CHAOS-MCAPI: An Optimized Mechanism to Support Multicore Parallel Programming

Abstract

This paper presents CHAOS-MCAPI (Communication Header and Operating Support-Multicore Communication API), an IPC mechanism targeting parallel programming based on message passing on multicore platforms. The proposed mechanism is built on top of the D-Bus protocol for message transmission, which allows a higher abstraction level and control when compared to lower-level mechanisms such as UNIX Pipes. Optimizations adopted by the implementation of CHAOS-MCAPI resulted in significant performance gains in relation to the original D-Bus implementation, which should be further improved by the adoption of KDBus, a 'zero-copy' mechanism recently made available natively in the Linux Kernel. That should make CHAOS-MCAPI a viable alternative for the design and implementation of parallel programs targeting multicore platforms, both in terms of scalability and programmer's productivity.