In:
ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Vol. 24, No. 2 ( 1996-05), p. 296-307
Abstract:
The SHRIMP multicomputer provides virtual memory-mapped communication (VMMC), which supports protected, user-level message passing, allows user programs to perform their own buffer management, and separates data transfers from control transfers so that a data transfer can be done without the intervention of the receiving node CPU. An important question is whether such a mechanism can indeed deliver all of the available hardware performance to applications which use conventional message-passing libraries.This paper reports our early experience with message-passing on a small, working SHRIMP multicomputer. We have implemented several user-level communication libraries on top of the VMMC mechanism, including the NX message-passing interface, Sun RPC, stream sockets, and specialized RPC. The first three are fully compatible with existing systems. Our experience shows that the VMMC mechanism supports these message-passing interfaces well. When zero-copy protocols are allowed by the semantics of the interface, VMMC can effectively deliver to applications almost all of the raw hardware's communication performance.
Type of Medium:
Online Resource
ISSN:
0163-5964
DOI:
10.1145/232974.233004
Language:
English
Publisher:
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Publication Date:
1996
detail.hit.zdb_id:
2088489-8
detail.hit.zdb_id:
186012-4
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