Active Messages Implementations for the Meiko CS-2
摘要
Active messages provide a low latency communication architecture which on modern parallel machines achieves more than an order of magnitude performance improvement over more traditional communication libraries. It is used by library and compiler writers to obtain the utmost performance and has been used to implement the novel parallel language Split-C. This paper discusses the experience we gained while implementing active messages on the Meiko CS-2, and discusses implementations for similar architectures. The CS-2 is an interesting experimental platform, as it resembles a cluster of Sparc workstations, each equipped with a dedicated communication co-processor. During our work we have identified two mismatches between the requirements of active message and the Meiko CS-2 architecture. First, architectures which only support efficient remote write operations (or DMA transfers as in the case of the CS-2) make it difficult to transfer both data and control as required by active messages. ...