Designing a Common Communication Subsystem

Abstract

Communication subsystems are used in high-performance parallel computing systems to abstract the lower network layer. By using a communication subsystem, an upper middleware library or runtime system can be more easily ported to different interconnects. By abstracting the network layer, however, the designer typically makes the communication subsystem more specialized for that particular middleware library, making it ineffective for supporting middleware for other programming models. In previous work we analyzed the requirements of various programming-model middleware and the communication subsystems that support such requirements. We found that although there are no mutually exclusive requirements, none of the existing communication subsystems can efficiently support the programming model middleware we considered. In this paper, we describe our design of a common communication subsystem, called CCS, that can efficiently support various programming model middleware.