Message Passing Architectures
Complete computer as building block, including I/O
- Communication via explicit I/O operations
- Natural for web computing ….
Programming model:
- Directly access only private address space (local memory)
- Off processor access via explicit messages (send/receive)
High-level block diagram similar to distributed-memory SAS (Shared Address Space)
- But off pr integrated at IO level; needn’t be into memory system
- Like networks of workstations (clusters), but tighter integration with specialized I/O
- Easier to build than scalable SAS
Programming model more removed from basic hardware operations (?)
- But natural for some problems as exposes parallelism rather than writing a parallel algorithm in a sequential language and letting some bunch of ignorant threads uncover what you knew anyway …. (SAS model?)