FLIPC: A Low Latency Messaging System for Distributed Real Time Environments

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.