Digital´s clusters and scientific parallel applications

Traditional implementations of message passing libraries such as PVM [1] have incurred high latencies. The use of a low latency interconnect [2] and well tuned message passing software greatly reduces this latency. For an interesting class of applications, this reduced latency has a great impact on execution time. This paper describes Digital´s low latency interconnect, Memory Channel, from a low-level programmer´s perspective. It then gives an overview of the implementation of message passing libraries on top of Memory Channel, and finally describes the impact of such an optimized message passing facility on an application.