Support for Send-and-Receive Based Message-Passing for the Single-Chip Message-Passing Architecture

Arguably, from the programmer's perspective, the programming model is the most important characteristic of any computer system. Perhaps this explains why, after many decades of research, architects and programmers alike continue to debate the appropriate programming model for parallel computers. Though thousands of programming models have been developed, standards such as PVM and MPI have made send-and-receive based message-passing the most popular programming model for distributed memory architectures. This thesis explores modifying the Single-Chip Message-Passing (SCMP) architecture to more efficiently support send-and-receive based message-passing. The proposed system is compared, for performance and programmability, to the active messaging programming model currently used by SCMP. SCMP offers a unique platform for send-and-receive based message-passing. The SCMP design incorporates multiple multi-threaded processors, memory, and a network onto a single chip. This integration reduces the penalties of thread switching, memory access, and inter-process communication typically seen on more traditional distributed memory parallel machines. The mechanisms proposed in this thesis to support send-and-receive based message-passing on SCMP attempt to preserve and exploit these features as much as possible.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Science

Level thesis:degree_level

masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Department dc:contributor.department

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

2004

Author dc:creator

• Lewis, Charles William Jr.

Chair dc:contributor.committeechair

• Baker, James M. Jr.

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Arthur, James D.
• Jones, Mark T.

• Single-Chip Computer
• Parallel Computing
• Message-Passing

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Dc Identifier Other

etd-04302004-104254

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/32049