Patent ID: 7958513

Claim:
A method of communicating among processes in a symmetric multi-processor (SMP) cluster environment, wherein at least some SMP nodes of the SMP cluster comprise multiple processes, the method comprising: (i) transferring intra-nodal at an SMP node messages of a collective communication among processes of the SMP node, the transferring comprising employing a shared memory of the SMP node to facilitate the transferring; and (ii) responsive to the transferring (i), concurrently transferring inter-nodal multiple messages of the collective communication from n SMP node(s) to m other SMP node(s), wherein at least one of n or m is greater than one and the SMP node is one SMP node of the n SMP nodes or the m other SMP nodes, and wherein the concurrently transferring comprises at least one of: concurrently sending a plurality of messages of the multiple messages from multiple processes of a single SMP node of the n SMP nodes wherein each of the multiple processes concurrently participates in the concurrent sending of the plurality of messages from the multiple processes, or concurrently transferring a plurality of messages of the multiple messages to multiple processes of a single SMP node of the m SMP nodes, the multiple processes concurrently receiving the concurrently transferred plurality of messages.