Memory management in a combined VIA/SCI hardware

Abstract

In this document w emake a brief review of memory management and DMA considerations in case of common SCI hardware and the Virtual Interface Architecture. On this basis we expose our ideas for an improved memory management of a hardware combining the positive characteristics of both basic technologies in order to get one completely new design rather than simply adding one to the other. The described memory management concept provides the opportunity of a real zero-copy transfer for Send-Receive operations by keeping full exibility and efficiency of a nodes' local memory management system. From the resulting hardware we expect a very good system throughput for message passing applications even if they are using a wide range of message sizes. © 2000 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.