Fast heterogeneous binary data interchange

Abstract

As distributed applications have become more widely used, they more often need to leverage the computing power of a heterogeneous network of computer architectures. Modern communications libraries provide mechanisms that hide at least some of the complexities of binary data interchange among heterogeneous machines. However, these mechanisms may be cumbersome, requiring that communicating applications agree a-priori on precise message contents, or they may be inefficient, using both "up" and "down" translations for binary data. Finally, the semantics of many packages, particularly those which require applications to manually "pack" and "unpack" messages, result in multiple copies of message data, thereby reducing communication performance. This paper describes PBIO (Portable Binary Input/Output), a novel messaging middleware which offers applications significantly more flexibility in message exchange while providing an efficient implementation that offers high performance.