Programming Experience between PVM and TreadMarks - Generalisations.

In MP, data communication and synchronisation are integrated together. The send and receive operations not only exchange data, but also regulate the progress of the processors.

In TreadMarks, synchronisation is through locks/barriers, which do not communicate data. Moreover, data movement is triggered by expensive page faults, and a diff request is sent out in order to get the modifications.

In addition, MP benefits from the ability to aggregate scattered data in a single message, an access pattern that would result in several miss messages in the invalidate-based TreadMarks protocol.