Architecture and implementation of the socket interface on top of GAMMA

GAMMA (the Genoa active message machine) is a lightweight messaging system for fast and Gigabit Ethernet. It is based on an active message-like paradigm and provides a performing, cost-effective alternative to proprietary high-speed networks, e.g. Myrinet, with the combination of low end-to-end latency and high throughput. GAMMA supports the important class of MPI based parallel applications via the MPI/GAMMA interface [G. Ciaccio], but up to now support for the also important class of socket based cluster applications is still missing. This paper describes two different approaches to how the socket interface can be adapted to GAMMA: The first is transparent for both application and GAMMA layer, the second is only transparent for the application. First performance results with the so-called GAMMA sockets are given. They show that the second approach performs almost as good as native GAMMA communication.