Date: Wed, 20 Nov 1996 19:27:49 GMT Server: NCSA/1.4 Content-type: text/html Last-modified: Sun, 29 Sep 1996 00:04:30 GMT Content-length: 3063
This interface generalizes previous active messages interfaces to support a broader spectrum of applications such as client/server programs, file systems, operating systems, as well continuing support for parallel programs.
Active Messages represent a RISC approach to communication, providing simple primitives, rather than solutions, which expose the full hardware performance to higher layers. Active Messages are intended to serve as a substrate for building libraries that provide higher-level communication abstractions and for generating communication code from a parallel-language compiler, rather than for direct use by programmers. It is currently in use at UC Berkeley by the Fast Communication layers (sockets, RPC and MPI), the xFS parallel file system, the Split-C and Id compilers, as well as in other libraries like Scalapack.
This project investigates Active Messages on a broad range of hardware,
including a dedicated message processor per node (Intel Paragon and Myrinet)
an FDDI interface at the graphics bus of a high end workstation
(HP 735 with Medusa), and a conventional interface to the next generation
LAN (Sparc 10 with Sahi-1 ATM). We will thus demonstrate concepts by
construction and evaluate them on real programs on real machines. The
result will be a clearer understanding of the communication architecture
and trade-offs in the hardware organization of the network interface.
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