Abstract

Protocol Compilation: High-Performance Communication for Parallel Programs by Edward W. Felten Co-Chairpersons of Supervisory Committee: Professor John Zahorjan Professor Edward D. Lazowska Department of Computer Science and Engineering One obstacle to the use of distributed-memory multicomputers has been the disappointing performance of communication primitives. Although the hardware is capable of moving data very quickly, the software has been unable to exploit this potential. The main cause of this "communication gap" is protocol overhead. In addition to moving the application's data between processors, communication systems must engage in other communication and synchronization to ensure correct execution. Protocol overhead is an inherent attribute of parallel computation --- it occurs on all machines, under all programming models. To reduce the effect of protocol overhead, I advocate the use of tailored protocols --- communication protocols custom-designed to work with a p...

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