Basic HTML version of Foils prepared 13 February 2000

Foil 36 Message-Passing Systems

From Methodology of Computational Science CPS615 Computational Science -- Spring Semester 2000. by Geoffrey C. Fox


1 Program is based on typically coarse-grain tasks
2 Separate address space and a processor number for each task
3 Data shared by explicit messages
  • Point-to-point and collective communications patterns
4 Examples: MPI, PVM, Occam for parallel computing
5 Universal model for distributed computing to link naturally decomposed parts e.g. HTTP, RMI, IIOP etc. are all message passing
  • distributed object technology (COM, CORBA) built on functionally concurrent objects sending and receiving messages
6 Advantages:
  • Close to hardware ALWAYS
  • Can be close to problem as in distributed objects or functional parallelism
7 Disadvantages:
  • Many low-level details when NOT close to problem.

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