Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
The design of the Sparcle chip, which incorporates mechanisms required for massively parallel systems in a Sparc RISC core, is described. Coupled with a communications and memory management chip (CMMU) Sparcle allows a fast, 14-cycle context switch, an 8-cycle user-level message send, and fine-grain full/empty-bit synchronization. Sparcle's fine-grain computation, memory latency tolerance, and efficient message interface are discussed. The implementation of Sparcle as a CPU for the Alewife machine is described.>
Agarwal et al. (Tue,) studied this question.