Message Passing Support on StarT-Voyager
No single message passing mechanism can efficiently support all the different types of communication that occur naturally in most parallel or distributed programs. MIT's StarT-Voyager, a hybrid message passing/shared memory parallel machine, provides four message passing mechanisms to achieve v...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
|---|---|
| Other Authors: | |
| Format: | Text |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
IEEE Computer Society
1996
|
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.18.8681 http://www.lcs.mit.edu/publications/pubs/ps/MIT-LCS-TM-387.ps.gz |
| Summary: | No single message passing mechanism can efficiently support all the different types of communication that occur naturally in most parallel or distributed programs. MIT's StarT-Voyager, a hybrid message passing/shared memory parallel machine, provides four message passing mechanisms to achieve very high performance over a wide spectrum of communication types and sizes. Hardware and operating system enforced protection allows direct user-level access to message passing facilities in a multiuser environment. StarT-Voyager's protection scheme improves upon past designs by not requiring strictly synchronized gang-scheduling, and by supporting nonmonolithic protection domains. To minimize the development effort and cost, the machine is designed to use unmodified commercial PowerPC 604-based SMP systems as the building block. A Network End-point Subsystem (NES) card which plugs into one of each SMP's processor card slots provides the interface to Arctic, a low-latency, high-bandwidth network . |
|---|