Message passing support on StarT-Voyager

Abstract

No single message passing mechanism can efficiently support all types of communication that commonly occur 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 high performance over a wide spectrum of communication types and sizes. Hardware and address translation 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 non-monolithic 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 developed at MIT. This paper describes StarT-Voyager's message passing mechanisms and their predicted performance.