Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

The Design And Evolution Of Zipcode, Anthony Skjellum, Steven G. Smith, Nathan E. Doss, Alvin Leung

Northeast Parallel Architecture Center

Zipcode is a message-passing and process-management system that was designed for multicomputers and homogeneous networks of computers in order to support libraries and large-scale multicomputer software. The system has evolved significantly over the last five years, based on our experiences and identified needs. Features of Zipcode that were originally unique to it, were its simultaneous support of static process groups, communication contexts, and virtual topologies, forming the "mailer" data structure. Point-to-point and collective operations reference the underlying group, and use contexts to avoid mixing up messages. Recently, we have added "gather-send" and "receive-scatter" semantics, based on persistent Zipcode "invoices," both …