An Adaptive Message-Passing System for ATM-Based Wide-Area Clusters

In this paper we present an architecture, implementation, and performance evaluation of an adaptive communication system (ACS) for wide-area ATM clusters. Our approach capitalizes on thread-based programming model to overlap computation and communication and develop a dynamic message-passing environment with separate data and control paths. This leads to a flexible and adaptive message-passing environment that can support multiple flow control, error control, and multicasting algorithms. We show the performance of ACS applications and compare them with p4, PVM, and MPI applications.