Method of hybrid message passing with shared memory

Messages are passed from a sending processor to one or more receiving processors. If the data to be included in the message is smaller than a predetermined size, then the message data is placed in the message. Otherwise the data is placed in a memory, to which all of the processors have access. A pointer to the location of the data in the shared memory is included in the message. A unique identifier may be added to the data and the message. This identifier may be a time stamp. The predetermined size may be given in a configuration file. It may be based on the amount of time it takes to transmit a message.