M-VIA, other alternatives to TCP for Gb-enet

[Greg Lindahl]

On Tue, Mar 19, 2002 at 09:48:27PM -0500, William R. Pearson wrote:

> I am curious about alternatives to TCP/IP based communication for MPI
> and PVM on 100 MHz and 1 GHz ethernet.  I believe that alternatives
> are routinely used by Myrinet users, and I wonder whether Gbit
> ethernet systems have access to similar low-latency protocol
> alternatives.

Bill,

There are a couple out there: M-VIA, GAMMA. M-VIA only recently
acquired support for error correction, and it isn't debugged. That's
necessary for gigabit if you want to run very big or long or fast, but
people have tested it without error correction on smallish clusters,
and it was much better than TCP/IP, as you would expect. The GAMMA
guys claim to have done error correction a while ago. Both projects
only support a limited number of chipsets.

greg