Asynchronous Broadcast on the Intel SCC using Interrupts
Darko Petrović, Omid Shahmirzadi, Thomas Ropars, André Schiper · Infoscience (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) · 2012
Abstract—This paper focuses on the design of an asynchronous broadcast primitive on the Intel SCC. Our solution is based on OC-Bcast, a state-of-the-art k-ary tree synchronous broadcast algorithm that leverages the parallelism provided by on-chip Remote Memory Accesses to Message Passing Buffers. In the paper, we study the use of parallel inter-core interrupts as a means to implement an efficient asynchronous group communication primitive, and present the userspace library we designed to be able to use interrupts in OC-Bcast and make it work asynchronously. Our experimental evaluation shows that our algorithm allows parallel broadcast operations to efficiently progress concurrently and provides low latency for a single broadcast operation. It highlights that parallel interrupts can help implementing efficient group communication primitives on many-core systems. I.