What are pros and cons of message passing?

Answer 1

Advantages:

• Memory is scalable with the number of processors. Increase the number of processors and the size of memory increases proportionately.
• Each processor can rapidly access its own memory without interference and without the overhead incurred with trying to maintain global cache coherency.
• Cost effectiveness: can use commodity, off-the-shelf processors and networking.

Disadvantages:

• The programmer is responsible for many of the details associated with data communication between processors.
• It may be difficult to map existing data structures, based on global memory, to this memory organization.
• Non-uniform memory access times - data residing on a remote node takes longer to access than node local data.

source : https://computing.llnl.gov/tutorials/parallel_comp/#distributedmemory