Message passing on InfiniBand RDMA for parallel run-time supports

InfiniBand networks are commonly used in the high performance computing area. They offer RDMA-based opera- tions that help to improve the performance of communication subsystems. In this paper, we propose a minimal message-passing communication layer providing the programmer with a point-to- point communication channel implemented by way of InfiniBand RDMA features. Differently from other libraries exploiting the InfiniBand features, such as the well-known Message Passing Interface (MPI), the proposed library is a communication layer only rather than a programming model, and can be easily used as building block for high-level parallel programming frameworks. Evaluated on micro-benchmarks, the proposed RDMA-based communication channel implementation achieves a comparable performance with highly optimised MPI/InfiniBand implemen- tations. Eventually, the flexibility of the communication layer is evaluated by integrating it within the FastFlow parallel frame- work, currently supporting TCP/IP networks (via the ZeroMQ communication library).