Customized Message Passing

Abstract

Replacing traditional operating systems communication implementations with customized implementations increases the performance of parallel and distributed applications. This paper describes the design and implementation of customizable message passing systems. The customized message passing systems are generated using application-specific information such as the profile of an application's communication pattern. FFT, Simplex, and Cholesky are used as example parallel applications. The message passing system has also been customized for different types of distributed system services including a distributed scheduling facility. The customized message passing system likewise improves the performance of these facilities and enhances their scalability. As a practical concern, as there are a large number of possible optimizations, object-oriented frameworks are employed to organize the implementations and to facilitate the choice of optimizations. © 1997 Academic Press.