Newsgroups: comp.parallel.mpi From: Martin Audet Subject: MPI Implementation on VIA ? Organization: National Research Council (Canada) Date: Mon, 13 Apr 1998 14:41:46 -0400 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <35325C6A.41C6@nrc.ca> In April edition of BYTE Magazine Scott Mace wrote a short article about the Virtual Interface Architecture (VIA), a standard developed by Microsoft and Compact ("Commodity Clusters", p 87). This standard would allow high bandwidth and low latency communication in a PC cluster using a special network and a simplified protocol stack (simpler and more efficient than TCP/IP or UDP/IP). It would also allows remote DMA memory transfer and the network adapter is supposed to help the CPU to transfer data. Unfortunately this article seems to be oriented toward commercial applications (e.g. database servers) and doesn't mention any scientific applications of that technology. In my opinion that technology seems perfect for message passing scientific applications on a low cost PC cluster (at least much better than the actual Ethernet networks using TCP/IP or UDP/IP protocols). Did anyone heard about an MPI implementation using that technology ? Martin -- =========================================================================== Martin Audet Industrial Materials Institute E-mail: martin.audet@nrc.ca National Research Council Tel : (514) 641-5034 75, de Mortagne, Boucherville, (Que) (514) 641-5364 (lab.) Canada Fax : (514) 641-5104 J4B 6Y4