Abstract
In this paper, we develop a messaging infrastructure, called LLM, to arrive at a robust and efficient low latency message passing infrastructure for kernel-to-kernel communication. The main focus is to overcome the high latencies associated with the conventional communication protocol stack management of TCP/IP. The LLM provides a transport protocol that offers high reliability at the fragment level keeping the acknowledgment overhead low given the high reliability levels of the LAN. The system utilizes some of the architectural facilities provided by the Linux kernel specially designed for optimization in the respective areas. Reliability against fragment losses is ensured by using a low overhead negative acknowledgment scheme. The implementation is in the form of loadable modules extending the Linux OS. In a typical implementation on a cluster of two nodes, each of uniprocessor Intel Pentium 400 MHz on a 10/100 Mbps LAN achieved an average round trip latency of .169ms as compared to the .531ms obtained by ICMP (Ping) protocol. A relative comparison of LLM with others is also provided.
The work was done under the project Design and Implementation of Secure Systems for E-Commerce, supported from MIT, New Delhi.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
A. Barak, I. Metrik, Performance of the communication layers of TCP/IP with the Myrinet Gigabit LAN, Computer Communications, Vol. 22, No.11, July 1999, http://www.mosix.cs.huji.ac.il/ftps/com.ps.gz.
Jeff Bonwick, The slab allocator: An object caching kernel memory allocator, USENIX Summer Tech. Conf., Boston, Mass. 1994.
Brad Fitzgibbons, Linux slab allocator, http://www.cc.gatech.edu/people/home/bradf/cs7001/proj2/linux_slab.html.
A. Mainwarning, D. E. Culler, Active Message Application Programming Interface and Communication Subsystem Organization, TR, Univ. of Calif., Berkeley,1995.
S.P.V. Karamcheti, A. A. Chien,Fast Messages: Efficient, Portable Communication for Workstation Clusters and MPP’s, IEEE Concurrency 5(2):60–73, 1997.
H. Tezuka, A. Hori, Y. Ishikawa, M. Sato, PM: An Operating System Coordinated High Performance Communication Library, in Proc.Int.Conf. on High-Performance Computing and Networking (HPCN Europe 1997), pp. 708–717, April 1997.
T. von Eicken, A. Basu, W. Vogels, U-Net: A user level network interface for parallel and distributed computing, in Proc.15th ACM Symp on Operating Systems Principle, pp. 40–53, 1995.
J. Peterson, T. Norman, Buddy Systems, CACM, June 1977.
Giuseppe Ciaccio A Communication system for Efficient Parallel Processing on Clusters of Personal Computers, PhD Thesis DISI-TH-1999-02, June 1999.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2002 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Shyamasundar, R.K., Rajan, B., Prasad, M., Jain, A. (2002). LLM: A Low Latency Messaging Infrastructure for Linux Clusters. In: Sahni, S., Prasanna, V.K., Shukla, U. (eds) High Performance Computing — HiPC 2002. HiPC 2002. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2552. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-36265-7_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-36265-7_11
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-00303-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-36265-4
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive