Message Passing Support on StarT-Voyager

• Main Authors: Boon S. Ang, Derek Chiou, Arvind, Larry Rudolph
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE Computer Society 1996
• Subjects: Arctic; Nes; Nes’
• 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

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 .