Hardware support for interprocess communication

Author

Ramachandran, Umakishore ; Solomon, Marvin ; Vernon, Mary K.

Author_Institution

Sch. of Inf. & Comput. Sci., Georgia Inst. of Technol., Atlanta, GA, USA

Volume

1

Issue

3

fYear

1990

fDate

7/1/1990 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

318

Lastpage

329

Abstract

The use of a special-purpose coprocessor for supporting message passing is proposed. An actual message-based operating system is partitioned into computation and communication parts, executing, respectively, on a host and a message coprocessor which interact through shared queues. Its performance is measured on a multiprocessor. Hardware support in the form of a special-purpose smart bus and smart shared memory is designed. The benefits of these components are demonstrated through analytical modeling using generalized timed Petri nets. The analysis shows good agreement with experimental results and indicates that substantial benefits may be obtained when the software is partitioned between host and the message coprocessor and when a small amount of special-purpose hardware is added

Keywords

Petri nets; distributed processing; performance evaluation; protocols; analytical modeling; generalized timed Petri nets; hardware support; interprocess communication; message passing; message-based operating system; shared queues; smart shared memory; special-purpose coprocessor; special-purpose smart bus; Bandwidth; Computer architecture; Coprocessors; Costs; Hardware; Kernel; Local area networks; Message passing; Operating systems; Petri nets;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Parallel and Distributed Systems, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

1045-9219

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/71.80159

Filename

80159