Fast Messages (FM)

Fast Messages (FM) is a low-level messaging layer designed to deliver underlying network's hardware performance to the application, even for small messages. For example, FM delivers 43 megabytes/second for messages as short as 256 bytes with even higher peak performance. FM makes bandwidth accessible, without requiring changes in applications (or protocols) to increase message size.

Fast Messages (FM) is also designed to enable convenient and high performance layering of other API's and protocols atop it. As such it provides key guarantees: reliable, in order delivery, and host-network decoupling as well as a composable interface: efficient gather/scatter, receiver rate control, and per-packet multithreading which make it easy to build higher level interfaces based on FM. Some of the interfaces our group has built include MPI, Shmem Put/Get, Global Arrays and BSP. Because the FM messaging layer is a simple, efficient set of primitives, it is appropriate for implementors of a language runtime or communications library or even the target of a compiler, in addition to application programmer use. Fast Messages is the core communication layer the High Performance Virtual Machines (HPVM) project.

Platforms

Users

A number of interesting experiments our being pursued by other researchers using FM.

For More Information: Papers, talks, and software distributions

Primary contributors include: Scott Pakin, Matt Buchanan, Mario Lauria, and Andrew Chien

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Last updated August 1999

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