EXPERIMENT IN PARTITIONING COMMUNICATIONS FUNCTION IN MULTIPROCESSOR SYSTEMS.

Abstract

In this paper, we describe an experiment that was conducted recently to study the effects of separating 'I/O driven', or 'interrupt driven', communications functions from 'non-I/O driven' data processing functions in a host complex. I/O driven tasks were separated and 'off-loaded' to a separate processor in the complex. Experimental shared-memory hardware was used to connect this I/O processor to the non-I/O driven application processor. Hardware measurements were taken and the results indicate that there is a significant improvement in effective processing power due to such function partitioning. Furthermore, the experiment has also shown that the robustness of the overall system may improve by appropriately combining distribution (both in hardware and software) and sharing.