An NIU Architecture for Open S & M Systems

• Main Authors: M Systems, Boon S. Ang, Arvind, Derek Chiou, Larry Rudolph
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 1997
• Subjects: Arctic
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.18.401; http://www.lcs.mit.edu/publications/pubs/ps/MIT-LCS-TM-392.ps.gz

This paper presents the architecture of a network interface unit (NIU) to provide a wide range of shared memory and message passing (S&M) semantics within the confines of an open system composed of a cluster of SMP's and a high speed interconnection network. An open system allows commodity items to be easily assembled and replaced without requiring hardware modifications to the commodity components. The StarT-Voyager system, which is built using PowerPC 604e-based SMP's from IBM and the low-latency, high-bandwidth Arctic network developed at MIT, is an example of such a system. The StarT-Voyager NIU card plugs into a processor card slot of each SMP and implements shared memory on top of a message-passing layer which is fully exposed to application programs. Four message passing mechanisms are directly supported to achieve very high performance over a wide spectrum of communication types and sizes. The NIU is also capable of supporting protocols for a wide variety of memory models. Sta.