The network interfaces of existing multicomputers require a significant amount of software overhead at the operating system and user levels to provide protection and to implement message passing protocols. This paper describes the design of a low-latency, high-bandwidth, virtual memory-mapped network interface for the SHRIMP multicomputer project at Princeton University. Without sacrificing protection, the network interface achieves low latency by using virtual memory mapping and write-latency hiding techniques, and obtains high bandwidth by providing a user-level block data transfer mechanism. We have implemented several message passing primitives in an experimental environment, demonstrating that our approach can reduce the message passing overhead to a few user-level instructions.

This technical report has been published as

Virtual Memory Mapped Network Interface for the SHRIMP Multicomputer. Matthias A. Blumrich, Kai Li, Richard D. Alpert, Cezary Dubnicki, Edward W. Felten, and Jonathan S. Sandberg, ISCA '94