Siemens Aktiengesellschaft

Brigitte Glas

Dieter Kolb

Markus Radlhammer

When a user program is processed on a parallel computer system, individual processes of the user program are executed concurrently on different processors. The situation may arise here that a first process requires data generated by a second process. The first process must then wait during processing until the second process makes this data available. In order not to extend the program runtime when translating such a user program, the instructions of a first process that access data generated by a second process open result cells in a memory area that is locked for the user mode, in which the data generated by the second process is then entered. During the processing of the user program after the translation for the parallel computer system, all instructions with memory access are examined to determine whether the addressed memory location is a result cell in the locked memory area. If this is the case, then the operating system interrupts the processing of the user program and starts an interrupt routine which has access to the result cell in the system mode. It is determined thereby whether the result is already present in the result cell, and in this case the result is made available to the process. Otherwise, the first process remains interrupted until the result supplied by the other process has been entered in the result cell.

Growing community of inventors

Munchen, Germany

Brigitte Glas