Active messages versus explicit message passing under SUNMOS

摘要

In the past few years much effort has been devoted to finding faster and more convenient ways to exchange data between nodes of massively parallel distributed memory machines. One such approach, taken by Thorsten von Eicken et al. is called Active Messages. The idea is to hide message passing latency and continue to compute while data is being sent and delivered. The authors have implemented Active Messages under SUNMOS for the Intel Paragon and performed various experiments to determine their efficiency and utility. In this paper they concentrate on the subset of the Active Message layer that is used by the implementation of the Split-C library. They compare performance to explicit message passing under SUNMOS and explore new ways to support Split-C without Active Messages. They also compare the implementation to the original one on the Thinking Machines CM-5 and try to determine what the effects of low latency and low band-width versus high latency and high bandwidth are on user codes.