Communication Primitives

GASNet-style runtimes generally expose two classes of primitives: remote memory access and active messages.

Remote memory access

• Put: one-sided write into a remote address space
• Get: one-sided read from a remote address space

Focus on these metrics:

• Initiation cost vs. completion latency
• Ordering guarantees
• Alignment and registration penalties

Active messages

Active messages combine data movement with a handler invocation on the target node. They are valuable for control-plane and fine-grained coordination.

Key observations to document:

• Handler queue depth
• Handler execution time
• Progress mode (polling vs. interrupts)