Message-Passing Programming

Abstract

The message-passing programming model is based on the abstraction of a parallel computer with a distributed address space where each processor has a local memory to which it has exclusive access, see Sect. 2.3.1. There is no global memory. Data exchange must be performed by message passing: to transfer data from the local memory of one processor $A$ to the local memory of another processor $B$, $A$ must send a message containing the data to $B$, and $B$ must receive the data in a buffer in its local memory. To guarantee portability of programs, no assumptions on the topology of the interconnection network is made. Instead, it is assumed that each processor can send a message to any other processor.