Message Passing Support on StarT-Voyager

No single message passing mechanism can efficiently support all the different types of communication that occur naturally in most parallel or distributed programs. MIT's StarT-Voyager, a hybrid message passing/shared memory parallel machine, provides four message passing mechanisms to achieve very high performance over a wide spectrum of communication types and sizes. Hardware and operating system enforced protection allows direct user-level access to message passing facilities in a multiuser environment. StarT-Voyager's protection scheme improves upon past designs by not requiring strictly synchronized gang-scheduling, and by supporting nonmonolithic protection domains. To minimize the development effort and cost, the machine is designed to use unmodified commercial PowerPC 604-based SMP systems as the building block. A Network End-point Subsystem (NES) card which plugs into one of each SMP's processor card slots provides the interface to Arctic, a low-latency, high-bandwidth network ..

The START-VOYAGER Parallel System

This paper presents the communication architecture of the START-VOYAGER system, a parallel machine composed of a cluster of unmodified IBM 604e-based SMP's connected via a high speed interconnection network. A custom network interface unit (NIU) plugs into a processor card slot of each SMP, providing a high-performance message passing substrate that supports both fast user-level message passing and cache-line coherent shared memory. The substrate consists of four hardware implemented message passing mechanisms to achieve high performance over a wide spectrum of communication patterns. START-VOYAGER also introduces a novel protection scheme which improves upon past designs by not requiring strictly synchronized gang-scheduling, and by allowing system code and multiple user applications to share the network simultaneously without compromising protection nor performance. Performance predictions based on synthesized Verilog code show START-VOYAGER's novel message passing mechanisms offer ..

Computation Structures Group

hahaha,derek,rudolph,arvind¡ This paper presents the communication architecture of the START-VOYAGER system, a parallel machine composed of a cluster of unmodified IBM 604e-based SMP’s connected via a high speed interconnection network. A custom network interface unit (NIU) plugs into a processor card slot of each SMP, providing a high-performance message passing substrate that supports both fast user-level message passing and cache-line coherent shared memory. The substrate consists of four hardware implemented message passing mechanisms to achieve high performance over a wide spectrum of communication patterns. START-VOYAGER also introduces a novel protection scheme which improves upon past designs by not requiring strictly synchronized gang-scheduling, an