Design and Implementation of NX Message Passing Using SHRIMP Virtual Memory Mapped Communication

Abstract:

This paper describes the design, implementation and performance of the
NX message-passing interface on the SHRIMP multicomputer. Our
implementation exploits SHRIMP's virtual memory-mapped
communication facility. Unlike traditional methods, our implementation
performs buffer management at user level without using a special
message-passing processor, and requires no CPU
intervention upon message arrival in the common cases. For a
four-byte message, our implementation achieves a user-to-user latency
of 12 microseconds which is about factor of four smaller than that on
the Intel Paragon. For large messages, our implementation quickly
approaches the bandwidth limit imposed by the SHRIMP hardware.

This technical report has been published as

Design and Implementation of NX Message Passing Using SHRIMP
Virtual Memory Mapped Communication. Richard Alpert,
Cezary Dubnicki, Edward Felten and Kai Li,
Proc. of the Internat. Conference on Parallel
Processing, August 1996.