User-level communication architectures for system-area networks is a very active research area [15, 8, 12, 23, 20, 2, 24, 10].
But, only two other user-level communication systems are currently available for Windows NT. A myrinet-based Fast Messages (FM) [20] implementation has recently been ported to the NT platform. Since it is implemented entirely at user-level, it does not require any OS support. U-net [2] has also been ported to an NT cluster. However, they use Fast Ethernet and require kernel modifications to implement low-overhead kernel entry and exit.
While this paper only presents the results of our porting VMMC to Windows NT, there is a lot of published work describing the various efforts that are part of the SHRIMP project. The VMMC mechanism [5, 15, 9], our low-level communication layer, performs direct data transfers between virtual memory address spaces bypassing the operating system. We have also designed and implemented several compatibility communication software including NX message-passing library [1], RPC [3], and Unix stream sockets [14], and showed that they deliver good performance. Finally, applications are implemented using the higher level APIs: (i) distributed file system [22], (ii) SPLASH2 [25], and (iii) distributed OpenGL graphics applications.