Reduced interprocessor-communication architecture for supporting programming models

Abstract

The paper presents an execution model and a processor architecture for general purpose massively parallel computers. To construct an efficient massively parallel computer: the execution model should be natural enough to map an actual problem structure into a processor architecture; each processor should have efficient and simple communication structure; and computation and communication should be tightly coupled and their operation should be highly overlapped. To meet these, we obtain a simplified architecture with a Continuation Driven Execution Model. We call this architecture RICA. RICA consists of a simplified message handling pipeline, a continuation-driven thread invocation mechanism, a RISC core for instruction execution, a message generation pipeline which can send messages asynchronously with other operations, and a thread switching mechanism with little overhead, all of which are fused in a simple architecture. Next, we state how RICA realizes parallel primitives of programming models and how efficiently it does. The primitives examined are-shared memory primitives, message passing primitives and barriers.<>