Abstract
The VIA is an effective and reliable network interface for SANs. Although the VIA enables low-latency and high-bandwidth communication for cluster computing, the specification only provides a minimal set of primitive functions for sending/receiving single messages. In this thesis, we present a reliable multicast protocol over VIA (RMVIA). We define two types of communication topologies and provide transmission protocol and error control. Several design issues to implementing the protocol: synchronization, pre-posting constraint, duplicated data transfer, single-threading and reliability. They can be solved by handshaking mechanism that we define in RMVIA. The transmission latency of RMVIA is short. In a small multicast group, to transmit 32kbyte data to six hosts, the RMVIA only spends about 1.6msec. In a large multicast group, if the sender transmits 32kbyte data to 35 hosts, RMVIA spend 2.56ms.