Integrating Message-Passing and Shared-Memory: Early Experience

This paper discusses some of the issues involved in implementing a shared-address space programming model on large-scale, distributed-memory multiprocessors. While such a programming model can be implemented on both shared-memory and messagepassing architectures, we argue that the transparent, coherent caching of global data provided by many shared-memory architectures is of crucial importance. Because message-passing mechanisms are much more efficient than shared-memory loads and stores for certain types of interprocessor communication and synchronization operations, however, we argue for building multiprocessors that efficiently support both shared-memory and message-passing mechanisms. We describe an architecture, Alewife, that integrates support for shared-memory and message-passing through a simple interface; we expect the compiler and runtime system to cooperate in using appropriate hardware mechanisms that are most efficient for specific operations. We report on both integr...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1993
• Where: PPOPP
• Authors: David A. Kranz, Kirk L. Johnson, Anant Agarwal, John Kubiatowicz, Beng-Hong Lim
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, Message-passing Mechanisms, PPOPP 1993, Programming Model, Shared-memory Architectures