Newsgroups: comp.parallel
From: "Patrick C. Beard" <beard@cs.ucdavis.edu>
Subject: Re: Active Messages
Organization: Computing Research Group
Date: 15 Apr 1995 08:32:04 GMT
Message-ID: <3n36su$jrt@usenet.srv.cis.pitt.edu>

In article <3mje1g$srp@usenet.srv.cis.pitt.edu> Tariq Rashid, tariq@cis.ufl.edu writes:
>I would like to know more about the term "Active Messages".  I'll
>appreciated any pointer to articles, TRs, etc. about Active Messages.

Here's the best reference I know:

T. H. von Eicken.  Active Messages:  an Efficient Communication
Architecture for Multiprocessors.  Ph.D. thesis, Computer Science,
Graduate Division, University of California, Berkeley, CA, 1993.

I think you can get the postscript for it somewhere at
ftp.cs.berkeley.edu. If not, you can contact the author.

What I know:  "active messages" is a very versatile communication
architecture for distributed memory machines. It assumes a SPMD
programming model, so that you can pass around pointers to C functions
and assume they are valid in all nodes of a parallel computation. The
basic idea is that you can send a pointer to some code you want to
execute, along with parameters, to a remote node.  This can be used to
easily implement remote memory operations. Split-C is usually
implemented on top of "Active Messages." 

// author:          Patrick C. Beard
// organization:    Computing Research Group
// e-mail:          beard@cs.ucdavis.edu

