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Portals 4 network API definition and performance measurement

Brightwell, Ronald B.

Portals is a low-level network programming interface for distributed memory massively parallel computing systems designed by Sandia, UNM, and Intel. Portals has been designed to provide high message rates and to provide the flexibility to support a variety of higher-level communication paradigms. This project developed and analyzed an implementation of Portals using shared memory in order to measure and understand the impact of using general-purpose compute cores to handle network protocol processing functions. The goal of this study was to evaluate an approach to high-performance networking software design and hardware support that would enable important DOE modeling and simulation applications to perform well and to provide valuable input to Intel so they can make informed decisions about future network software and hardware products that impact DOE applications.