Skip to main content
U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

ComPaSS: A communication package for scalable software design

Journal Article · · Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing; (United States)
; ; ;  [1]
  1. Michigan State Univ., East Lansing, MI (United States). Dept. of Computer Science

In massively parallel computers (MPCs), efficient communication among processors is critical to performance. This paper describes the initial implementation of the ComPaSS communication library to support scalable software development in MPCs. ComPaSS provides high-level global communication operations for both data manipulation and process control, many of which are based upon a small set of low-level communication primitives. The low-level operations of the ComPaSS library are provably optimal for a class of architectures representative of many commercial scalable systems, in particular those using wormhole routing and n-dimensional mesh network topologies. This paper concentrates on the multicast and multireceive components of the ComPaSS library, which are fundamental to implementing efficient high-level data parallel operations. The design of the multicast and multireceive primitives is described and an example of a data parallel application utilizing ComPaSS multicast is given. The scalability of these primitive is discussed, and improvements in performance resulting from use of the library on a 64-node nCUBE-2 are presented.

DOE Contract Number:
FG02-93ER25167
OSTI ID:
7137807
Journal Information:
Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing; (United States), Journal Name: Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing; (United States) Vol. 22:3; ISSN JPDCER; ISSN 0743-7315
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English