PTLib (Parallel Tools Library) Software Catalog

Active Messages

Abstract

With recent advances in local area networks, networks of workstations differ from massively parallel processors primarily in packaging, cost and software emphasis. The key open architectural question is the nature of the network interface or communication architecture: its hardware organization and logical abstraction as a basis for communication. Active Messages represent a RISC approach to communication, providing simple primitives, rather than solutions, which expose the full hardware performance to higher layers. Active Messages are intended to serve as a substrate for building libraries that provide higher-level communication abstractions and for generating communication code from a parallel-language compiler, rather than for direct use by programmers.

DateOfInformation

Thr Mar 27 16:10:03 1997

Domain

Parallel Processing Tools!Communication Libraries

Keyword

message passing library; communications library

TargetEnvironment

This project investigates Active Messages on a broad range of hardware, including a dedicated message processor per node (Intel Paragon and Myrinet) an FDDI interface at the graphics bus of a high end workstation (HP 735 with Medusa), and a conventional interface to the next generation LAN (Sparc 10 with Sahi-1 ATM).

Webpage

http://now.cs.berkeley.edu/AM/active_messages.html

ContactIs

David Culler