Active Ports: A Performance-Oriented Operating System Support to Fast LAN Communications

The Genoa Active Message MAchine (GAMMA) is an ee-cient communication layer for 100base-T clusters of Personal Computers running Linux. It is based on Active Ports, a communication mechanism derived from Active Messages. GAMMA Active Ports deliver excellent communication performance at user level (latency 12.7 s, maximum throughput 12.2 MByte/s, half-power point reached with 192 byte long messages), thus enabling cost-eeective cluster computing on 100base-T. Despite being implemented at kernel level in the Linux OS, the performance numbers of GAMMA Active Ports are much better than many other LAN-oriented communication layers, including so called \user-level" ones (e.g. U-Net).