| Summary: | Clusters of workstations are often claimed to be a good platform for parallel processing, especially if a fast network is used to interconnect the workstations. Indeed, high performance can be obtained for low-level message passing primitives on modern networks like ATM and Myrinet. Most application programmers, however, want to use higherlevel communication primitives. Unfortunately, implementing such primitives efficiently on a modern network is a difficult task, because their software overhead is relatively much higher than on a traditional, slow network (such as Ethernet). In this paper we investigate the issues involved in implementing a high-level programming environment on a fast network. We have implemented a portable runtime system for an object-based language (Orca) on a collection of processors connected by a Myrinet network. Many performance optimizations were required in order to let application programmers benefit sufficiently from the faster network. In particul.
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