Myrinet Scalable Cluster Interconnect enhances throughput of legacy applications

As such, the PCI64B solution can offer 133 Mhz RISC and memory with 1067 MBs memory latency, 2.5 Gbaud, full duplex, and mostly fiber. Myrinet delivers faster RISCs, higher local memory bandwidth, higher levels of integration, and higher throughput.

The speaker distinguished between single port Myrinet PCI-X interfaces and the two port PCI-X interfaces based on 300 MHz and LAN. Myrinet provides the first chips with multi-protocol ports which can act as a long-range Myrinet port. There is also interoperability between Myrinet and InfiniBand.

Myrinet uses applications such as MPI and VIA as middleware as well as the GM Message Passing system.

The Myrinet Roadmap presents GM2 as a restructuring of the GM Myrinet Control Programme. In addition to the middleware layers mentioned above, Markus Fischer introduced Sockets-GM, a thin software layer which mimics TCP/IP semantics but uses the GM over Myrinet transport directly to achieve high performance. Sockets-GM offers binary compatibility by keeping also control of original socket functions. It is BSD sockets compliant for Linux and Solaris, and also Winsock 1 and Winsock 2 compliant. It has a buffer and RDMA semantics.

Markus Fischer ended with the message that Sockets-GM is currently in use to speed up real world applications. For example, it speeds up the number of transactions of a legacy database.