Abstract

Passing messages between programs using shared memory, what we refer to as memory-based messaging, is a recognized technique for efficient communication that takes advantage of memory system performance. However, the conventional operating system support for this approach is inefficient, especially for large-scale shared memory multiprocessors, and is too complex to effectively support in hardware. This paper presents support for memory-based messaging, with both hardware and software optimizations, that provides communication performance closely coupled with the memory system performance on a scalable memory architecture. We describe our model, its implementation in an operating system kernel and hardware support for this approach in a scalable multiprocessor architecture. The optimizations include address-valued signals, message-oriented memory consistency and automatic signaling on write. Initial evaluations show these extensions provide a three to five fold improvement in communica...

Citations