MESH: MEssaging and ScHeduling for Fine-Grain Parallel Processing on Commodity Platforms

Peter van der Stok

Presented at: Int. Conf. on Parallel and Distributed Techniques and Applications, Las-Vegas, 28 June-1 July 1999. PDPTA99

ABSTRACT

MESH is a tight integration of an user-level thread scheduler and a zero-copy messaging system that enables efficient fine-grain parallel processing on commodity platforms with efficient support for fault-tolerance. We present the techniques used to deliver most of the performance of the underlying communication hardware to a multi-threaded application level, while introducing little CPU overhead. This is demonstrated by a performance analysis of a MESH implementation requiring only off-the-shelf products: PCs, running the Linux operating system, equipped with Fast and Gigabit Ethernet network interface cards.

Postscript