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CHAPTER
7 Scalable Multiprocessors
To make the machine operation more concrete, let us consider a few simple oper-
ations. Suppose a user process wants to write data into the address space of another
process of the same parallel program. Protection is provided by a capability for a
communication context that both processes share. The source compute processor
builds a DMA descriptor and issues a start-DMA command. Its DMA processor reads
the descriptor and transfers the data as a sequence of blocks, each of which involves
loading up to 32 bytes from memory and forming a write_block network trans-
action. The input processor on the remote nod ...