DEADLOCK-FREE MESSAGE-PASSING SYSTEM FOR MIMD COMPUTER PROCESSING SYSTEMS UTILIZING A CSP PROGRAMMING MODEL

摘要

A message-passing system allows for deadlock-free message-passing and ability to support irregular connection topologies among nodes in the computer system. Messages are passed from node (74) to node utilizing buffers (82) at intermediate nodes to temporarily store the messages. The user code is divided into multiple concurrent user processes (64) which communicate with each other via channels (82-2). Each user process executing at a node is also provided with a corresponding, but separate, router process (80) which uses a set of N-1 virtual channels (84) to communicate with all other processes in the system, N being the number of processes. The router process (80) is provided with a routing table (86) implementing the minimum route length solution for interconnecting nodes in any arbitrary network topology. The router process (80) also allows for standard I/O functions to be emulated at every node in the system. The router process implements a buffer pool (120-1 and 120-2) management structure which is organized by channels (118) and hops.