Message Passing Support on StarT-Voyager

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 pro-tection allows direct user-level access to message passing facilities in a multiuser environment. StarT-Voyager’s pro-tection scheme improves upon past designs by not requiring strictly synchronized gang-scheduling, and by supporting non-monolithic protection domains. To minimize the devel-opment effort and cost, the machine is designed to use un-modified commercial PowerPC 604-based SMP systems a