The M-cache: a message-retrieving mechanism for multicomputer systems

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 provides hardware support for the message search operation often performed in message-directed programming. It also provides a mechanism for bandwidth matching between the interconnection network and local memory of a node. Through simulation experiments, the authors 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 sufficient to effect over an order of magnitude reduction in message-retrieval time. Such hardware support is needed to make the cost-effective implementation of fine-grain concurrent programs a reality