Fine-Grain, Message-Passing Processing Node

摘要

This paper describes a processing node for a fine-grain message-passing concurrent computer. The node consists of a processor, a communication unit, and a memory. To reduce the overhead of message passing and task switching to 5us, the node incorporates a send instruction, a fast communication system, hardware message buffering and dispatch, and a general translation mechanism. These mechanisms work together to implement a fine-grain programming system.