The goal of the High Performance Virtual Machines (HPVM) project is to enable high-performance computing on distributed computational resources. The applications HPVM supports include both traditional supercomputing applications and novel, emerging, high-performance distributed applications. We strive to achieve HPVM's goal of high performance on these applications without preventing programmers from using the standard APIs to which they are accustomed.
As microprocessors continue to increase in performance, they have been approaching the performance of the fastest vector processors and, because of their low cost, have become the building block of choice for high-performance parallel computing systems. While parallel machines typically exploit custom high-performance networks, high-speed commodity networks are becoming widely available at a reasonable cost. The conjugation of high-performance networks and gigaflop microprocessors makes high-performance computing on clusters an attractive alternative to the more traditional, tightly-integrated parallel computers.
Because of the speed of recent computer and network hardware, the critical performance challenges all involve software:
HPVM 1.9 targets clusters of Pentium II computers running Windows NT interconnected with a Myrinet network, Giganet network or a SMP's CPU/memory bus. Other interconnects such as sockets and Servernet II will likely be supported in future releases. Also, support for Linux-based PCs is being considered. The performance of HPVM is surprisingly competitive with MPP systems, such as the IBM SP2 and Cray T3D. It achieves impressive low-level communication performance across the cluster: one-way latencies < 9usec and bandwidths > 100MBytes/sec---even for small packets (< 256 bytes).
HPVM 1.9 supports the following interfaces(1), with peak latencies (usecs) and bandwidths (MBytes/sec) listed beside each:
HPVM 1.9 contains a number of changes from previous versions that improve raw performance, reliability, process protection, and configurability. A simplified installation procedure allows end-users to more easily configure their cluster.
HPVM 1.9 supports the following high-speed interconnects:
Please see the HPVM WWW site(4) for the latest software release information.
The following is an illustration of the programmer's view of HPVM:
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