By Jon Bashor, jbashor@lbl.gov

January 4, 1999

The DOE Office of Science announced just before Christmas that it will fund a proposal by NERSC's Future Technologies Group (FTG) to develop software for high performance clusters. The research project, a collaboration between LBNL, the Intel Corporation Enterprise Server Group, and Argonne National Lab, will investigate applications and extensions of the Virtual Interface Architecture (VIA), a hardware/software standard for high performance communication in clusters. The project is funded under the Energy Research Laboratory Technology Research (ER-LTR) program. Total funding including Intel matching will be $1.6 million over four years.

VIA is an emerging hardware and software standard for high-performance communication within a cluster. It allows an application to get direct user-level access to the network, bypassing the operating system and the overhead associated with protocols such as TCP/IP. VIA will widen the space of parallel applications that can be efficiently executed by clusters, and has many commercial applications. VIA is a successor to a number of academic research projects, including Berkeley's Active Messages, Illinois Fast Messages, U-Net and others. The primary advantage of VIA is its strong industry backing, and the fact that it will be widely supported by hardware.

The project will be based on M-VIA, a high performance modular implementation of VIA developed by Patrick Bozeman in the NERSC Future Technologies Group. M-VIA is a leading VIA implementation, and the only implementation of VIA for Linux. It is currently in beta testing (http://www.nersc.gov/research/FTG/via) and will be officially released this spring.

Overall, Berkeley Lab was funded for four projects by the Office of Science (SC) -- the most of any SC lab.