Entry Wallach:1995:OAM from sigplan1990.bib

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BibTeX entry

@Article{Wallach:1995:OAM,
  author =       "Deborah A. Wallach and Wilson C. Hsieh and Kirk L.
                 Johnson and M. Frans Kaashoek and William E. Weihl",
  title =        "Optimistic active messages: a mechanism for scheduling
                 communication with computation",
  journal =      j-SIGPLAN,
  volume =       "30",
  number =       "8",
  pages =        "217--226",
  month =        aug,
  year =         "1995",
  CODEN =        "SINODQ",
  ISSN =         "0362-1340 (print), 1523-2867 (print), 1558-1160 (electronic)",
  ISSN-L =       "0362-1340",
  bibdate =      "Sun Dec 14 09:17:08 MST 2003",
  bibsource =    "http://portal.acm.org/",
  abstract =     "Low-overhead message passing is critical to the
                 performance of many applications. Active messages (AMs)
                 reduce the software overhead for message handling:
                 messages are run as handlers instead of as threads,
                 which avoids the overhead of thread management and the
                 unnecessary data copying of other communication models.
                 Scheduling the execution of AMs is typically done by
                 disabling and enabling interrupts or by polling the
                 network. This primitive scheduling control puts severe
                 restrictions on the code that can be run in a message
                 handler. This paper describes a new software mechanism,
                 optimistic active messages (OAM), that eliminates these
                 restrictions; OAMs allow arbitrary user code to execute
                 in handlers, and also allow handlers to block. Despite
                 this gain in expressiveness, OAMs perform as well as
                 AMs. We used OAM as the base for a remote procedure
                 calling (RPC) system, Optimistic RPC (ORPC), for the
                 CM-5 multiprocessor; it consists of an optimized thread
                 package and a stub compiler that hides communication
                 details from the programmer. ORPC is 1.5 to 5 times
                 faster than traditional RPC (TRPC) for small messages
                 and performs as well as AMs. Applications that
                 primarily communicate using large data transfers or are
                 fairly coarse-grained perform equally well. For
                 applications that send many short messages, however,
                 the ORPC and AM implementations are up to 3 times
                 faster than the TRPC implementations. Using ORPC,
                 programmers obtain the benefits of well-proven
                 programming abstractions, do not have to be concerned
                 with communication details, and yet obtain nearly the
                 performance of hand-coded AM programs.",
  acknowledgement = ack-nhfb,
  affiliation =  "Lab. for Comput. Sci., MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA",
  classification = "C6150N (Distributed systems software)",
  keywords =     "Application performance; Arbitrary user code;
                 Blocking; CM-5 multiprocessor; Coarse-grained
                 applications; Communication detail hiding;
                 Communication scheduling; Computation scheduling;
                 Expressiveness; Large data transfers; Low-overhead
                 message passing; Message handlers; Optimistic active
                 messages; Optimistic remote procedure calls; Optimized
                 thread package; Programming abstractions; Software
                 overhead; Stub compiler",
  thesaurus =    "Message passing; Remote procedure calls; Scheduling",
}

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