Exhibits, Demos & Posters
A Model for Communication in Clusters of Multicore Machines
Authors
- Christine Task, Department of Computer Science, Indiana University
- Arun Chauhan, Department of Computer Science, Indiana University
Abstract
A common paradigm for scientific computing is distributed message-passing systems, and a common approach to these systems is to implement them across clusters of high-performance workstations. As multicore architectures become increasingly mainstream, these clusters are very likely to include multicore machines. However, the theoretical models which are currently used to develop communication algorithms across these systems do not take into account the unique properties of processes running on shared-memory architectures, including the existence of processes which can communicate by shared-memory locations and processes which share their connections to the external network. Because of this, existing algorithms are far from optimal for modern clusters. Additionally, recent attempts to adapt these algorithms to multicore systems have proceeded without the introduction of a more accurate formal model and have generally neglected to capitalize on the full power these systems offer. We propose a new model which simply and effectively captures the strengths of multicore machines in collective communications patterns, and suggest how it can be used to properly optimize these patterns.
