[Beowulf] dynamic repackaging of messages

[Peter St. John]

I was just reading Jeff Layton's networking-for-HPC article in Linux Mag
http://www.linux-mag.com/launchpad/business-class-hpc/build/3507 and it got
me thinking if it would be feasible for a parallel application to
distinguish two sorts of messages: urgent (e.g. computing the gravitational
effect of my molecule on a remote node's molecule) or leisurely (e.g.
checkpointing a statistical synopsis to disk). Then the NIC, or the daemon
buffering for the NIC, could buffer "leisurely" items for collascing into
very large messages, while shooting "urgent" messages immediately. This
might reduce interupts to the minimum needed by the nature of the app.
Does this sound workable? does something already provide such a feature, and
does it sound desirable if not? I haven't programmed anything in MPI yet but
didn't seem immediate.
Thanks,
Peter
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