The MIT Alewife Machine: Architecture and Performance

Alewife is a multiprocessor architecture that supports up to 512 processing nodes connected over a scalable and cost-effective mesh network at a constant cost per node. The MIT Alewife machine, a prototype implementation of the architecture, demonstrates that a parallel system can be both scalable and programmable. Four mechanisms combine to achieve these goals: software-extended coherent shared memory provides a global, linear address space; integrated message passing allows compiler and operating system designers to provide efficient communication and synchronization; support for fine-grain computationallows many processorsto cooperateon small problem sizes; and latency tolerance mechanisms

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1998
• Where: ISCA
• Authors: Anant Agarwal, Ricardo Bianchini, David Chaiken, Kirk L. Johnson, David A. Kranz
• Keywords: Hardware, ISCA 1998, Message Passing, MIT Alewife Machine, Shared Memory