This work is devoted to describe a C++ class containing basic and advanced
services for message passing through a communication network. From now on, we
will call this class NetStream since the design goals will lead us to
define a "stream-like" interface for accessing the network.
Message passing is a well-known communication paradigm very useful in a set of assorted application domains, both for LAN and WAN services. PVM [3] and MPI [2] are two popular libraries that fit rather well this category. However, we envision some other goals that make this "raw" libraries appear working at too "low-level" for our target users. In fact, our start objectives for the communication library are listed below and own a close relationship to the necessities of the Spanish national funded project MALLBA (TIC1999-0754-C03-03):
In order to cope with these goals the resulting system must show a great deal of concrete features. Since we need both basic and advanced services we need to define methods in the final C++ class devoted to these two types of users. In any case, we plan to offer methods having a very clear interface so that the learning time will be minimized. In addition, because we want to access both LAN and WAN characteristics an effort must be made to make a uniform interface for they two in terms of resulting methods of the class.
Besides that, efficiency is an important goal, given that we want to use the library both for sparse and intense message passing programs. And finally, we directly embrace the object oriented technology; the reason is that we really want to separate implementation from conceptual services. Of course, abstraction, re-utilization, and extension must be taken into account because nowadays libraries continuously undergo revision steps in order to fix or add new services to the existing ones.
As a result, we adopt MPI [2] as the base communication library in
order to implement NetStream because it is a standard in
message passing and becauseof its efficiency and future connectivity
with emerging technologies such as Globus [1]. However, this
not prevent a future change in the implementation of the
NetStream library services on a different underlying
system. Also, we will use directly C++ as the base language since
it is object oriented, very popular, and (at present) more
efficient than Java implementations for the so many different kind
of applications we are devising NetStream.
We will develop the whole library in a "stream-like" fashion.
This means that we will only need to declare a NetStream
object and then go on with it by invoking the appropriate methods.
We will use the standard inserter <<" and \emph{extractor} \verb">>
operators in order to express reception and transmission of
information on a net stream. This will bring uniformity to our
new streams with respect to standard input/output streams and also
it will allow the programmer input/output a sequence of objects in
a single statement (as well as it helps in reducing the verbosity
that would from using a named method instead of these operators).
NetStream netstream;
...
netstream << 9 << 'a' << "hello world";
...
Next section will deal with the definition of the basic
services for novice users in version 1.0. Then, we will move on to more
advanced services in Section 3 aimed at satisfying the
needs of parallel programmers. Section 4 details the differences
among the sucessive versions of NetStream. In Section
5 we will show and explain some basic examples of use, just
to arrive to Section 6 in which we include an example of how
groups are dealt with. A performance analysis of times with parallel exchange
of data with NetStream is shown in Section 7.
Finally, we will finish by summarizing the contents of this paper and by
discussing some open lines in Section 8.