Fast Messages Communication Library

This document contains a complete description of the Fast Messages (FM) communications library. Along with a description of the library and an annotated list of primitives, there is a section on how to use the library and another on how to customize certain internal characteristics to suit your debugging needs or memory constraints. Two non-trivial example programs are also included as well as a references section. This document is written in a generic way and thus covers no specific version of the library.

INDEX OF THIS PAGE

Fast Messages Communication Library What is Fast Messages? Description of the FM library The Data Descriptor: ddesc The FM primitives Using the FM library FM User Requirements and Error Reporting User Requirements Error Reporting Debugging Options and Internal Characteristics Debugging Options Internal Characteristics Example 1
Example 2
References

What is Fast Messages?

Fast Messages (FM) is a communication library based on services provided by the Berkeley's Active Messages (AM) library or any other similar library. It provides higher level primitives than those in the AM library, all of them intended for communication between processes (processors on parallel machines.) It provides facilities for sending and receiving unicast messages as well as a simple interface for dealing with errors that may occur during the user computation. As of this writing, the FM library has been implemented and tested under the following AM-like primitive versions, machines and operating systems:

A TCP/IP version of Berkeley's AM, that works over TCP/IP on Sun machines running Solaris. This version is not intended for performance -which it would not achieve- but rather, for testing purposes. A version of the program under development can be compiled and run with this version until the program is ready for a "production" version based on a real parallel machine.

A CM-5 version of CMAML, that works on CM-5 machines running CMost .