Welcome to the new version of CaltechAUTHORS. Login is currently restricted to library staff. If you notice any issues, please email coda@library.caltech.edu
Published April 1990 | Published
Book Section - Chapter Open

A Portable Multicomputer Communication Library atop the Reactive Kernel

Abstract

Sophisticated multicomputer applications require efficient, flexible, convenient underlying communication primitives. In the work described here, Zipcode, a new, portable communication library, has been designed, developed, articulated and evaluated. The primary goals were: high efficiency compared to lowest-level primitives, user-definable message receipt selectivity, as well as abstraction of collections of processes and message selectivity to allow multiple, independently conceived libraries to work together without conflict. Zipcode works atop the Caltech Reactive Kernel, a portable, minimalistic multicomputer node operating system. Presently, the Reactive Kernel is implemented for Intel iPSC/1, iPSC/2, and Symult s2010 multicomputers and emulated on shared-memory computers as well as networks of Sun workstations. Consequently, Zipcode addresses an equally wide audience, and can plausibly be run in other environments.

Additional Information

© 1990 IEEE. The authors acknowledge Prof. Manfred Morari, who supervised the work presented in this student paper, and who encouraged the first author to pursue a systematic approach in the initial design and development of Zipcode during the Summer and Fall of 1988. We wish to acknowledge both the initial and recent suggestions of Lena Peterson and Sven Mattisson, as well as early input from Eric Van de Velde, all of whose previous experiences with and examples of "one-shot" message-passing layers provided valuable motivations for this work. We wish also to acknowledge Wen-King Su for his insightful advice over the last eightteen months, and Prof. Charles L. Seitz who offered helpful suggestions and encouragement. The first author acknowledges partial support under DOE grants DE-FG03-85ER25009 and DE-AC03-85ER40050. The second author (presently at the University of California, Santa Cruz) received support for his 1989 Caltech Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) under the same grants, and wishes to thank the Caltech SURF program for the opportunity to pursue the research discussed in part here. Zipcode was developed using machine resources made available by the Caltech Computer Science sub-Micron System Architectures Project and the Caltech Concurrent Supercomputer Facilities (CCSF).

Attached Files

Published - 00556280.pdf

Files

00556280.pdf
Files (983.7 kB)
Name Size Download all
md5:4bca5d03f6cd6b2ee248a9a9aab526b4
983.7 kB Preview Download

Additional details

Created:
August 19, 2023
Modified:
October 26, 2023