A quantitative approach to the design of block data transfer mechanism for an SMP-based message-passing system

The authors present the performance simulation and design of block data transfer mechanism for the SMP based message passing system called SPAX (Scalable Parallel Architecture computer based on X-bar network). For node-to-node block data transfer in SPAX, two schemes of memory-mapped transfer and DMA based transfer can be considered as a design alternative of network interface architecture. According to the simulation results, the DMA based scheme is more efficient for both latency and bandwidth rather than the memory mapped scheme in transferring the block data in SPAX. We also present the design of the block data transfer mechanism based on the DMA based transfer in detail, which is applied to SPAX