4.6. 4.6 Message Passing Channel

The Message Passing Channel pattern describes the design of a channel component for a Communicating Sequential Elements system on a distributed memory parallel system, based on message passing, by implementing the send and receive operations that perform the communications of the channel component. It can also be used on a shared memory parallel system.

4.6.1. Example

Consider the example from Section 3.3 for a distributed memory parallel platform: a parallel program is to be developed for calculating the Heat Equation using the Communicating Sequential Elements architectural pattern [OR98] [Ort00] [Section 3.3]. This architectural pattern applies a domain parallelism approach in which the data corresponding to the various temperatures of segments within a wire is partitioned among semi-autonomous sequential elements that make up the processing components of the program. Because the parallel program is to be developed for a distributed memory parallel computer, a message-passing communication method is considered. The programming language of such a parallel computer must therefore support basic synchronization mechanisms for process communication through message passing, such as send and receive primitives [Hoa78] [Har98].