[Barrelfish-users] about remote communication on barrelfish

[Xiaowen Wang]

Hi, Andrew,

Thanks for your advice.

TilePro has its own network structure, like distributed system, but it also has a shared memory for all cores, however, now we want to investigate to use its network to implement inter-core communication, without any shared memory involved. In this way perhaps we can reduce the use of cache coherence protocol, and also make full of of TilePro's hardware. We created a new backend for supporting the network structure, but still sticking to the RPC protocol. So far the monitor on the second core is working, and sending remote messages to the first core.

Best regards,
Xiaowen

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Hi Xiaowen,

The monitor is typically involved in setting up bindings for inter-core communication, but does not have to be on the data path for each message. For UMP, the monitor helps setup a region of shared memory between the dispatchers, but the actual messages travel directly between dispatchers using this shared memory.

I’m not sure what the Tile’s message architecture looks like, but I would hope it has a similar structure … having the monitor on the data path for each message would be a huge overhead. If you can share more about the hardware mechanisms available to you, perhaps we can suggest in more detail how to implement this in Barrelfish.

Cheers,
Andrew
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