A Comparison of Architectural Support for Messaging in the TMC CM-5 and the Cray T3D (1995)
| Venue: | In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Computer Architecture |
| Citations: | 55 - 15 self |
BibTeX
@INPROCEEDINGS{Karamcheti95acomparison,
author = {Vijay Karamcheti and Andrew A. Chien},
title = {A Comparison of Architectural Support for Messaging in the TMC CM-5 and the Cray T3D},
booktitle = {In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Computer Architecture},
year = {1995},
pages = {298--307}
}
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Abstract
Programming models based on messaging continue to be an important programming model for parallel machines. Messaging costs are strongly influenced by a machine's network interface architecture. We examine the impact of architectural support for messaging in two machines -- the TMC CM-5 and the Cray T3D -- by exploring the design and performance of several messaging implementations. The additional features in the T3D support remote operations: memory access, fetch-and-increment, atomic swaps, and prefetch. Experiments on the CM-5 show that requiring processor involvement for message reception can increase the communication overheads from 60% to 300% for moderate variations in computation grain size at the destination. In contrast, the T3D hardware for remote operations decouples message reception from processor activity, producing high-performance messaging independent of computation grain size or variability. In addition, hardware support for a shared address space in the T3D can be us...
