Author retrospective for anatomy of a message in the alewife multiprocessor
John D. Kubiatowicz · 2014
The MIT Alewife project, launched in the Spring of 1988, comprised a dynamic group of researchers who designed and implemented the Alewife multiprocessor [1]. One of the most important and unexpected outcomes of this project was the message-passing interface described in "Anatomy of a Message in the Alewife Multiprocessor," selected for this Retrospective. This interface was essential to the Alewife OS and runtime systems, was important for I/O, and enabled a new and innovative cache-coherence protocol, called Limit-LESS [3]. It also enabled direct comparisons between shared memory and message-passing [4]. Original paper: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/165939.165970.