The J-Machine: System Support for Actors

Abstract

The J-Machine in concert with its operating system kernel, JOSS, provides low-overhead system services to support actor programming systems. The J-Machine is not specialized to actor systems: instead, it provides primitive mechanisms for communication, synchronization, and translation. Communication mechanisms are provided that permit a node to send a message to any other node in the machine in < 2 microsecs. On message arrival, a task is created and dispatched in < 1 microsecs. A translation mechanism supports a global virtual address space. These mechanisms efficiently support most proposed models of concurrent computation. The hardware is an ensemble of up to 65,536 nodes each containing a 36-bit processor, 4K 36-bit words of memory, and a router. The nodes are connected by a highspeed 3-D mesh network. The design was chosen to make the most efficient use of available chip and board area.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Dec 01, 1988
Accession Number
ADA204210

Entities

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  • Bill Dally

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  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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  • Advanced Electronics
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  • Applied Combinatorial Optimization and Logic Circuit Design.
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