Active messages: a mechanism for integrated communication and computation
ISCA '92 Proceedings of the 19th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
Cooperative shared memory: software and hardware for scalable multiprocessor
ASPLOS V Proceedings of the fifth international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems
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Remote memory transfers (RMTs) allow processors to access non-local memories without involving the remote processor. As the only interprocessor synchronization required is setting flags on the local and remote processors after the transfer is complete, RMTs do not entail the overhead due to the handshaking and buffering of message passing nor require the complex hardware of cache-coherent shared memory. The minimal synchronization of RMTs, however, necessiates extra remote communications to enforce common data sharing paradigms, such as producer/consumer. We propose a new hardware mechanism: the conditional RMT (CMRT). CRMTs succeed or fail depending on the state of the remote data. We describe potential CRMT hardware definitions, and illustrate their utility by presenting efficient software protocols for producer/consumer and check-in/check-out data sharing.