Paolo  Marenzoni,  Giovanni  Rimassa, Michele  Vignali,  Massimo  Bertozzi,
Gianni Conte, and Pietro Rossi, An Operating System Support to Low-Overhead
Communications  in  NOW  Clusters,   Lecture  Notes  in  Computer  Science,
1199:130-143, February 1997.

This  paper  describes an  Operating  System  approach  to the  problem  of
delivering  low  latency  high  bandwidth communications  for  PC  clusters
running  a  public  domain  OS   like  Linux  and  connected  by  standard,
off-the-shelf networks  like Fast-Ethernet.  The $PARMA^2$ project  has the
main goal of designing the new light-weight protocol suite PRP, in order to
drastically reduce the software overhead introduced by TCP/IP. PRP wants to
offer at  high level a  stream socket oriented  interface and at  low level
compatibility with any  device driver. High level  compatibility is crucial
in  facilitating the  porting on  PRP of  existing applications  or message
passing packages. Moreover,  an optimized version of MPI, based  on PRP and
evolution  of the  widespread MPICH  implementation, is  under development,
allowing for a  very effective reduction of the  communication latencies in
synchronous communications, compared to the TCP/IP-based MPI.