A low-cost standard mode MPI hardware unit for embedded MPSoC

In this paper, we propose a novel low-cost Message Passing Interface (MPI) unit between processor nodes, which supports message passing in multiprocessor systems using distributed memory architecture. Our MPI unit operates in the standard mode - using the buffered mode for small amounts of data transaction and the synchronous mode for large amounts of data transaction. This results in increased performance by reducing the control message transmission time for the small amount of data. We verified the performance with a simulator designed based on SystemC. Additionally, we designed the MPI unit using VerilogHDL, and we synthesized it with a synopsys design compiler. The proposed standard mode MPI unit shows a high performance even though the size of the MPI unit occupies less than 1% of the whole chip. Thus, with respect to low-cost design and scalability, this MPI hardware unit is useful to increase overall performance of the embedded Multiprocessor System on a Chip (MPSoC).