Mechanisms for efficient, protected messaging
Whay Sing Lee, William J. Dally · DSpace@MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) · 1999
Fine-grain parallelism is the key to high performance muticomputing. By partitioning problems into small sub-tasks -- grain-sizes as small as 70 cycles have been found in common benchmark programs -- fine-grain parallelization accelerates existing applications beyond current limits, and promises efficient exploitation of multicomputers consisting of thousands of processors. However, contemporary multiprocessor architectures are not equipped to exploit parallelism at this level, due to high communication and synchronization costs that must be amortized over a large grain size. Operating system-managed message interfaces account for most of the high inefficiency in traditional systems. Conversely, in contemporary user-level network interfaces, fast hardware is defeated by software layers that are needed to provide safeguards against starvation and protection violation. This thesis addresses both the efficiency and robustness issues in the message interface. I propose a design which featu...