A Case Study of Shared Memory and Message Passing: The Triangle Puzzle

Abstract

This thesis is the first controlled case study that compares shared-memory and message-passing implementations of an application that solves the triangle puzzle and runs on actual hardware: only the communication interfaces used by the implementations vary; all other system components remained fixed. The implementations run on the MIT Alewife machine, a cache-coherent, distributed-shared-memory multiprocessor that efficiently supports both the shared-memory and message-passing programming models.