The Virtual Interface Architecture (VIA) has been recently introduced as a portable interface for high performance communication on system area networks (SAN). We show that it is difficult to use the VI Architecture directly as a building block for distributed, multithreaded runtime systems, and that an additional medium-level layer is needed to fill the gap with the applications. This layer should be carefully designed so as to preserve the definite qualities of VIA, and yet hide its low-level aspect to the user. As a case study, we present an implementation of our Madeleine programming interface for high performance networking on top of VIA, and we demonstrate the benefits of this approach through some preliminary experiments.

Data sorting is the most studied problem in computer science, for both, its theoretical importance and its use in so many applications. A parallel sorting algorithm on a heterogeneous system - PC cluster was implemented to minimize the application execution time. In this paper we propose a scheme for communicating data among subtasks during application program execution. We present some experimental results of the parallel sorting algorithm on a PC cluster.