Planned Direct Transfers: a programming model for real-time applications

This paper presents the "Planned Direct Transfer" programming model, developed by Mercury Computer Systems to meet the requirements of embedded high-performance computing applications. In this model, data transfers are "Planned" before they occur, resulting in low software overhead execution; they are also "Direct"-they do not require intermediate data copying. This paper locates the Planned Direct Transfer (PDT) model in the landscape of the standard approaches of shared memory and message passing.