Algorithms for Communication Compilation for Unreliable Networks

Networks of workstations (NOW) are becoming a popular environment for running parallel applications. However, parallel applications running on top of generic network protocols (e.g. TCP) in a NOW environment often do not perform as well as one would expect. Research shows that the performance of parallel applications depends on the performance of the underlying network protocols. Generic network protocols guarantee reliable message delivery but add unecesssary overheads that degrade the performance of parallel applications. Communication compilation is an automatic technique for generating efficient application-specific network protocols. In this paper, we discuss algorithms for communiation compilation which use knowledge of a parallel application's communication and computation behavior to generate optimized network protocols that guarantee the reliable delivery of messages. The resulting network protocols are more efficient than conventional communication libraries used in current NOW environments.