NHSE Software Catalog

Active Messages

url

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

author

Tony Chan, Cedric Krumbein, Lok T. Liu, Rich Martin

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.

description

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

reference

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

contact

David Culler / culler@cs.berkeley.edu

keywords

message passing library; communications library

environment

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).