Message Passing - Overview

Overview

Message passing is the paradigm of communication where messages are sent from a sender to one or more recipients. Forms of messages include (remote) method invocation, signals, and data packets. When designing a message passing system several choices are made:

• Whether messages are transferred reliably
• Whether messages are guaranteed to be delivered in order
• Whether messages are passed one-to-one (unicast), one-to-many (multicast or broadcast), many-to-one (client–server), or many-to-many (AllToAll).
• Whether communication is synchronous or asynchronous.

Prominent theoretical foundations of concurrent computation, such as the Actor model and the process calculi are based on message passing. Implementations of concurrent systems that use message passing can either have message passing as an integral part of the language, or as a series of library calls from the language. Examples of the former include many distributed object systems. Examples of the latter include Microkernel operating systems that pass messages between one kernel and one or more server blocks, and the Message Passing Interface used in high-performance computing.