An efficient implementation for broadcasting data in parallel applications over Ethernet clusters

Abstract

This paper introduces a natural implementation for broadcasting data on Ethernet based clusters used for parallel computing. Initially, it will be shown that libraries for Message Passing between processes such as PVM and implementations of MPI do not implement efficiently this operation or there is no reliability in terms of its performance. An implementation for broadcast messages is presented, taking into account the Ethernet based hardware layer found in most of the clusters used for parallel computing. The proposed implementation for broadcasting data is compared with the broadcast message available in PVM and LAM/MPI. Also, some comments are made about the proposed broadcast messages when the hardware layer is not Ethernet based. Finally, it will be shown by experimentation how the proposed broadcast message is used in the context of parallel linear algebra operations, specifically for parallel matrix multiplication.