Tutorial

This chapter will start by walking you through creating basic sender and receiver applications. The resulting application will not be high-performance, and will not cover all the features of the library. From there we will gradually evolve the applications to improve performance and demonstrate more features of the library.

Most of the tutorial covers both C++ and Python: just click the appropriate tab in code examples. Some low-level performance features are not accessible from the Python API.

The tutorial is best followed on GNU/Linux on an x86-64 system. The code should be portable to other POSIX systems (such as MacOS), but that’s untested, and some of the behaviour that’s pointed out (particularly performance) will be different.

The code that is developed in each tutorial appears in full at the end of the tutorial, and can also be found in the repository.

• 1. A quick introduction to SPEAD
• 2. Sender, version 1
• 3. Receiver, version 1
• 4. Measuring sender performance
• 5. Pipelining the sender
• 6. Increasing packet sizes
• 7. Optimising the power calculation
• 8. Reusing memory
• 9. Memory pools
• 10. Reusing heaps
• 11. Batching heaps
• 12. Receiving chunks