Asynchronous Entry Point

The synchronous entry points generate request messages which have to be serviced at the receiving node. The HLRC protocol provides an asynchronous entry point to process the received messages. This can be implemented in several ways:

• Hardware - If support is available in the network interface for asynchronous message handling (for instance with a complete implementation of the VIA specification, a page request can be serviced with an RDMA Read).
• Interrupt Handler - Interrupt handlers can be used to receive and process remote requests if notifications are issued on message arrival.
• Communication Thread - A separate communication thread can be used to handle messages, using either polling or blocking.

We use Giganet's implementation of VIA, which does not support RDMA Read or asynchronous notification. Therefore, the asynchronous entry point in our implementation is covered by a separate communication thread on each node that is responsible for handling all the incoming messages.