Hamlyn — an interface for sender- based communications
John Wilkes · 1992
This paper uses a characterization of three different types of interconnect traffic to drive the development of an innovative high-speed interconnect interface. This uses sender-controlled message placement at the recipient, which has the effect of greatly reducing the cost and complexity of message handling. The contributions of this work are in (a) elucidating the traffic model; (b) in defining the sender-driven communication scheme; and (c) in the detailed description of an efficient, protected interface to the interconnect hardware that allows applications running in nonprivileged mode to access the interconnect directly, without operating system intervention. This version of the paper contains a complete high-level design for the first version of Hamlyn---a hardware interface that accommodates all the Hamlyn functionality. Future work on the protocol stacks and implementation work will doubtless improve and modify this interface. Until then, this description serves as a functionally complete snapshot of the Hamlyn approach.