Date: Tue, 10 Dec 1996 23:11:35 GMT Server: NCSA/1.4.2 Content-type: text/html
Abstract
IRONMAN is a novel communication interface that enables portable compilers for parallel languages to exploit machine primitives for improved performance. Even hardware vendor supplied portable message passing interfaces such as MPI and PVM are not sufficient because their rigid interfaces often preclude the ability to exploit machine-specific features and employ machine independent optimizations. IRONMAN eliminates the overhead of portability by identifying the minimal, basic characteristics of communication on any machine and abstracting them into the interface, thereby facilitating platform-specific mappings of these abstractions that are best suited to the machine and even the application. We introduce the IRONMAN interface, its use, and its implementation. We demonstrate IRONMAN's ability to remain portable while delivering good performance for benchmarks on the Intel Paragon and the Cray T3D.
This paper is available upon request.