An Isotach Implementation for Myrinet

Abstract

An isotach network provides strong guarantees about message delivery order. We show that an isotach network can be efficiently implemented entirely in software, on off-the-shelf hardware. Parts of this implementation could be performed much more efficiently in hardware - we are currently developing hardware components to do this. The all-software version then serves several purposes: to rapidly develop a working isotach system to use as a platform for development of higher level software, to find potential problems in the hardware design, and to pre-test software components of the system so that they won't have to be debugged at the same time as hardware.