Subject: interrupt driven messages

From: [email-masked] (Dan C Marinescu)
Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1993 13:27:39 -0500

Lyndon Clarke writes:

> We have, reasonably in my opinion, decided not to provide interrupt
> driven receive/send (as in Intel hrecv/hsend) in MPI, or active
> messages. 

 Interrupt driven messages are too important to be left out. 
 Any attempt made either by the application or by the
 compiler to cache data in the local storage of any compute node can
 only be effective if interrupt driven messages are supported.

 The interrupt handling procedure should allow both MPI and I/O.
 
 Indeed, this opens a Pandora box. For example how many such messages 
 should be queued for a suspended process, should one place a limit
 upon the size of an interrupt message and upon the time spent in
 the interrupt handling procedure and so on. 

 Yet it seems reasonable to expect that the standardization effort in 
 OS will make this task easier, for example one could expect that
 more vendors will base their OS on OSF/1. Moreover, interrupt driven
 messages are likely to be provided by most vendors.

 Dan Marinescu