Appeal No. 96-3763
Application 07/946,509
the switch apparatus. This is done to reduce a software
overhead problem for message passing by providing special
hardware to assist the software in constructing the message to
be sent through the network. Every message is prefixed with a
message header describing the key control parameters of the
message. While, conventionally, it is the task of the soft-
ware to construct the
message header for every message individually and to transmit
the header first, prior to each message, the invention re-
lieves the software of this task by using special purpose
hardware to perform the job in less time and more efficiently
for certain types of messages. This special high speed mode
is called Hardware Built Message-Header (HBM) Mode and is used
to prefix all data it receives with a message header that uses
two fixed header words with all fields held constant except
for the destination field, the fixed portion of the header
being constructed by the hardware based on the contents of I/O
registers.
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