In: IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, Vol. 1, No. 3, pages 318-329. July 1990.
Abstract: The authors propose using a special-purpose coprocessor to support message passing. They partition an actual message-based operating system into computation and communication parts and measure its performance on a multiprocessor. They design a hardware support in the form of a special-purpose smart bus and smart shared memory and demonstrate the benefits of these components through analytical modeling using Generalized Timed Petri Nets. The analysis shows good agreement with the experimental results.
Keywords: hardware support (for) interprocess communication; message-based operating system; bus; shared memory; generalized timed net; bus; shared queues; performance evaluation; message coprocessor.