DHPC Adelaide

DHPC Technical Report DHPC-048

An Investigation of Flexible Communication Infrastructure in a Distributed High Performance Computing Environment

P.W.Tia, A.L.Wendelborn, and K.J.Maciunas

Archived: 3 August 1998

Published in Proc. of HPC Asia, Singapore, September 1998.

Abstract

Wide area distributed high-performance computing environments are becoming more important due to their cost-effective and flexible nature. This paper presents the results of an investigation into the communication system called Nexus in utilizing computing resources in such an environment. We specifically focus on the expressiveness and efficiency of the Nexus system in the construction of wide area applications. We describe the construction of client/server applications using Nexus, Nexus support for peer to peer server relationships and the construction of a Nexus directory server prototype based on the Nexus client/server technology. One powerful and unique facility that Nexus provides is support for multiple communication methods. However, our investigations revealed that the Nexus design does not fully meet our specific application requirements. Thus, we have incorporated a technique, based on a suitable cost function, to dynamically choose between alternative communication methods. We also benchmarked Nexus communication performance on a national experimental broadband ATM network

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