Asynchronous Distributed Broadcasting in Cluster Environment

摘要

Improving communication performance is an important issue in cluster systems. This paper investigates the possibility of accelerating group communication at the level of message passing libraries. A new algorithm for implementing the broadcast communication primitive will be introduced. It enhances the performance of fully-switched cluster systems by using message decomposition and asynchronous communication. The new algorithm shows the dynamism and the portability of the software solutions, while it has a constant asymptotic time complexity achieved only with hardware support before. Test measurements show that the algorithm really has a constant time complexity, and in certain cases it can outperform the widely used binary tree approach by 100 percent. The presented algorithm can be used to increase the performance of broadcasting, and can also indirectly speed up various group communication primitives used in standard message passing libraries.