A communications protocol for handling arbitrarily varying data st..rides in a distributed processing environment

Apparatus and an accompanying method for implementing a communications protocol for use in generally a distributed, and particularly a highly parallel, multi-processing system, for communicating application data of arbitrarily varying strides between separate processors and generally without the need for intermediate data storage. Specifically, application data is transferred through a succession of packets between originating and destination application programs (252), with each packet containing a partial data message. Each partial data message contains a portion of the data that is stored in a stride one portion of an originating application data memory. Upon reception, each data portion is written into a stride one portion of a destination application data memory. An application interface (254), executing independently at both the originating and destination processing elements locally and respectively determines the starting address and length of each separate stride one data portion stored in the originating application data memory and for each separate stride one area in the destination application program memory that is to receive application data. Advantageously, through use of these independent application interfaces, application data can be transferred from the originating application data memory at one arbitrarily varying stride to the destination application memory with a different arbitrarily varying stride but without the need to pass the data through any input/output (I/O) buffers.