The Impact of Hardware Communication on a Heterogeneous Computing System

This paper designed a MPI-like Message Passing Engine (MPE) as part of the on-chip network, providing point-to-point and collective communication primitives in hardware. On one hand, the MPE offloads the communication workload from the general processing elements. On the other hand, the MPE provides direct interface to the heterogeneous processing elements which can eliminate the data path going around the OS and libraries. The experimental results have shown that the MPE can significantly reduce the communication time and improve the overall performance, especially for heterogeneous computing systems.