Publications Details

Message passing in PUMA

Wheat, S.R.

This paper provides an overview of the message passing primitives provided by PUMA (Performance-oriented, User-managed Messaging Architecture). Message passing in PUMA is based on the concept of a portal--an opening in the address space of an application process. Once an application process has established a portal, other processes can write values into the memory associated with the portal using a simple send operation. Because messages are written directly into the address space of the receiving process, there is not need to buffer messages in the PUMA kernel. This simplifies the design of the kernel, increasing its reliability and portability. Moreover, because messages are mapped directly into the address space of the application process, the application can manage the messages that it receives without needing direct support from the kernel.