ARTS of PEACE - A High-Performance Middleware Layer for Parallel Distributed Computing

Parallel cluster architectures are an eeective way to build high-performance computer systems at a moderate price. Consequently clusters will become very attractive to parallel applications and high-end parallel servers, that are usually built around distributed object middleware. Commonly used middleware layers like CORBA have been speciically designed for heterogeneous computing within relatively slow networks. In contrast PC-and workstation clusters are homogeneous systems, that can be connected by very high-speed user-level networks. Only very lean and eecient middleware layers are therefore able to use such kind of communication infrastructure eeectively. In this paper we describe the architecture and implementation of Arts, a high-performance middleware layer developed for the Peace family of parallel operating systems and show that this mid-dleware is even applicable for the implementation of extremely performance sensitive virtual shared memory (VSM) systems.