Early experience with message-passing on the SHRIMP multicomputer

  • Authors:

  • Edward W. Felten;Richard D. Alpert;Angelos Bilas;Matthias A. Blumrich;Douglas W. Clark;Stefanos N. Damianakis;Cezary Dubnicki;Liviu Iftode;Kai Li

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ;Department of Computer Science, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ;Department of Computer Science, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ;Department of Computer Science, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ;Department of Computer Science, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ;Department of Computer Science, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ;Department of Computer Science, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ;Department of Computer Science, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ;Department of Computer Science, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ

  • Venue:
  • ISCA '96 Proceedings of the 23rd annual international symposium on Computer architecture
  • Year:
  • 1996

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Abstract

The SHRIMP multicomputer provides virtual memory-mapped communication (VMMC), which supports protected, user-level message passing, allows user programs to perform their own buffer management, and separates data transfers from control transfers so that a data transfer can be done without the intervention of the receiving node CPU. An important question is whether such a mechanism can indeed deliver all of the available hardware performance to applications which use conventional message-passing libraries.This paper reports our early experience with message-passing on a small, working SHRIMP multicomputer. We have implemented several user-level communication libraries on top of the VMMC mechanism, including the NX message-passing interface, Sun RPC, stream sockets, and specialized RPC. The first three are fully compatible with existing systems. Our experience shows that the VMMC mechanism supports these message-passing interfaces well. When zero-copy protocols are allowed by the semantics of the interface, VMMC can effectively deliver to applications almost all of the raw hardware's communication performance.