A COLLECTIVE COMMUNICATION MODEL BASED ON HETEROGENEOUS NOW

NOW（network of workstations） plays an important role in parallel computing. Collective communication in heterogeneous NOW is addressed in the paper. A hierarchic collective communication model is presented. The key approach to the solution is to transfer process oriented collective communications to subnet oriented collective communications, which exploits the suitable hardware supported multicast within each subnet and leads to efficient implementation of collective communications in heterogeneous NOW. A group management protocol is also depicted in details.