FLIPC: A Low Latency Messaging System for Distributed Real Time
Environments
David L. Black, Randall D. Smith, Steven J. Sears, and Randall W. Dean
Open Software Foundation Research Institute
Cambridge, MA
Abstract
FLIPC is a new messaging system intended to support distributed real
time applications on high performance communication
hardware. Application messaging systems designed for high performance
computing envi ronments are not well suited to other environments
because they lack support for the complex application structures
involving multiple processes, threads, and classes of message traffic
found in environments such as distributed real time. These messaging
systems also have not been optimized for medium size messages found in
important classes of real time applications. FLIPC includes
additional features to support applica tions outside the high
performance computing domain. For medium size messages, our system
significantly outperforms other messaging systems on the Intel Par
agon. An explicit design focus on programmable communication hardware
and the resulting use of wait-free synchronization was a key factor in
achieving this level of performance. The implementation of FLIPC was
accelerated by our use of PC clusters connected by eth ernet or by a
SCSI bus as development platforms to reduce the need for Paragon time.
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