Telegraphos: A Substrate for High-Performance Computing on Workstation Clusters

✍ Scribed by Manolis G.H. Katevenis; Evangelos P. Markatos; George Kalokerinos; Apostolos Dollas

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1997
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 322 KB
• Volume: 43
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0743-7315
• DOI: 10.1006/jpdc.1997.1334

✦ Synopsis

Networks of workstations and high-performance microcomputers have been rarely used for running parallel applications, because, although they have significant aggregate computing power, they lack the support for efficient message-passing and sharedmemory communication. In this paper we present Telegraphos, a distributed system that provides efficient message-passing and shared-memory support on top of a workstation cluster. We focus on the network interface of Telegraphos that provides a variety of shared-memory operations such as remote read, remote write, remote atomic operations, and DMA, all launched from user level without any intervention of the operating system. Telegraphos I, the Telegraphos prototype, has been implemented. Emphasis was placed on rapid prototyping, so the technology used was conservative: FPGAs, SRAMs, and TTL buffers.