A METHOD AND APPARATUS IN A COMPUTER SYSTEM HAVING PLURAL COMPUTERS WHICH CAUSE THE INITIATION OF FUNCTIONS IN EACH OTHER USING INFORMATION CONTAINED IN PACKETS TRANSFERRED BETWEEN THE COMPUTERS

To reduce an overhead of the interrupt on a processor associated with packet send and receive control in a network, a packet send command chaining unit is provided. Based on the control field in each packet send command, a send node controls an interrupt request to the processor in the packet level and sends a packet set with the control information to a receive node. Based on the control field in the received data packet, the receive node controls a receive circuit interrupt request, thereby reducing the number of times the interrupt on the instruction processor is caused for each packet send and receive operation.