Title: RDMA Locks and their Usefulness in High Performance Computing
 
Speaker: Kenin Coloma, Northwestern University
                              
Date/Time: Tuesday, September 14, 2005, 11:00-12:00 noon

Location: Building 980, Room 95 (Sandia NM)

Brief Abstract: A number of modern high performance interconnects available on today's supercomputers support low latency Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) or one-sided communication.  Given the similarity to shared memory programming, one can imagine the importance of having some means of globally protecting parts of memory.  Not surprisingly, some of the distributed lock algorithms developed for shared memory architectures can be used in the RDMA environment.  The MPI-2 RMA specification presents some unique challenges which make a performance comparison between distributed locking algorithms using Sandia's Portals communication library directly and an MPI-2 based locking algorithm developed at Argonne National Laboratories intriguing.