Massively Parallel Computer Systems Communications Research

Parallel processing is a "hot" topic in computer research field. Message passing based massive parallel processing systems, which performance greatly depend on the efficiency of the communication among their internal processors, are becoming the mainstream of the supercomputing market.The key to design efficent message passing systems for massive parallel processing systems is providing the ability to minimize communication overhead and overlap communication and computation. However, in message passing with traditional communication mechanisms, fairly high communication overhead is introduced by context switching, complicated buffer management and slow memory copying and so on. This overhead also presents an obstacle to overlap communication and computation. So careful attentions need to be paid to the sources of communication overhead and the methods available to reduce its compact. Active Messages provide a new communication mechanism for minimizing the software overhead of message passing and utilizing the full capability of the hardware.This paper addresses the implementation strategy of Active Message mechanism on the Dawning-1000. An communication software and some basic NX message passing functions, both based on Active Messages mechanism, have been designed and implemmented on the Dawning-1000 supercomputer system. This paper also presents the evaluation of the low_level communication on the Dawing-1000 including the interconnect network latency and the overhead of processor accessing FIFOs on...