The M - Cache : A Message - Handling Mechanism forMulticomputer

This paper presents the design and evaluation of the M-cache, a small, fast and intelligent memory for handling messages at the processing nodes of multicomputer systems. The M-cache is neither a conventional cache nor a message bu er, though it has some characteristics of both. It provides hardware support for the message search operation often performed in message-directed programming, a programming style inherent to the implementation of object-oriented paradigms on distributed computing systems. It also provides a mechanism for bandwidth matching between the interconnection network and local memory of a node. Through simulation experiments, we have studied the execution of concurrent algorithms on systems with and without M-caches to obtain relative speedup measures. The results show that a modest investment in silicon is su cient to e ect over an order of magnitude reduction in message-retrieval time. Such hardware support is needed to make the cost-e ective implementation of ne-grain concurrent programs a reality.