User-level Communication Protocols And Sockets Interface. Cluster Design

The Cost-effective Cluster has been used widely in high-performance computing and super server, but communication cost is always the key to limit it improved, which has become a hot research point in cluster. An available technique to reduce the cost is User-Level Communication (ULC) which is being developed perfect more and more. But the distinct of syntax between ULC and traditional communication interface enhance the difficulty to code design, and also prevent ULC from being applied widely. Since the UNIX sockets interface based on TCP/IP protocol has succeed in communication, of course the user-level sockets over ULC will be popular to programmer, which is motivation of thesis.First the thesis takes an overview of cluster technologies and gives some details in important components of its architecture. Cluster has been classed in the view of application in this thesis. After introducing System Area Network, thesis gives a presentation of classical high-speed network. By multi-processor computing model, the start-up cost is proved to result in decrease performance. The problems of TCP protocol in SAN and earlier prototype of UCL has been discussed. And this thesis gives the explicit interpret of the industrial standard VIA (Virtual Interface Architecture). Through analyzing the source code of MVIA (Modular Virtual Interface Architecture) implemented by Berkeley NERSC (National Energy Research Scientific Center), the primary data structure and some details in designing have discussed and performance of MVIA been concluded.The last part which is the most important in this thesis discussed some issues of sockets design. After analyzing the characteristic of UCL and referring many implement of sockets, a new way calledSMVIA to achieve user-level sockets is been brought forward which is to build sockets over MVIA VILP., and a new flow control protocol is used . By comparing the parameters defined by thesis to evaluate communication protocol, the performance of SMIVA is better than other two basic protocols'.