Massage-passing controllerr for a shared-memory multiprocessor

Although message-passing is a versatile communication paradigm in the multiprocessing arena [AthSe88], a pure message-passing mechanism via special communication channels is inefficient. Shared-memory multiprocessor systems are usually much cheaper and efficient. Conventional approaches tend to implement message-passing on top of shared-memory architectures using a pure software approach. Even with special techniques [FinHe88], the performance of such systems is still worse than simple shared-memory communication systems. In this paper, we shall present a hardware approach and new message-passing mechanisms that the pure software approach does not support. Such an approach is quite cost effective. The resulting system is suitable for studying concurrent software, scientific computations and distributed problem solving.