The comparative performance is studied of different message passing system designs experimentally on a shared memory Encore Multimax multiprocessor. The systems are measured both by benchmarks and by running example parallel applications. To act as a control, the shared memory machine results are compared with the performance of the benchmarks and applications on the Intel iPSC/2 running the NX/2 operating system. The design alternatives considered are buffering, buffer organization, reference and value semantics, synchronization, coordination strategy and the location of the system in user or kernel space. The results include measurements of the effects of the design alternatives, memory caching, message sizes and copying.
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