Basic HTML version of Foils prepared 17 November 1998

Foil 116 Message Passing Architectures

From Master Foilset for HPC Achitecture Overview CPS615 Basic Simulation Track for Computational Science -- Fall Semester 98. by Geoffrey C. Fox


Complete computer as building block, including I/O
  • Communication via explicit I/O operations
  • Natural for web computing ....
Programming model:
  • Directly access only private address space (local memory)
  • Off processor access via explicit messages (send/receive)
High-level block diagram similar to distributed-memory SAS (Shared Address Space)
  • But off pr integrated at IO level; needn't be into memory system
  • Like networks of workstations (clusters), but tighter integration with specialized I/O
  • Easier to build than scalable SAS
Programming model more removed from basic hardware operations (?)
  • But natural for some problems as exposes parallelism rather than writing a parallel algorithm in a sequential language and letting some bunch of ignorant threads uncover what you knew anyway .... (SAS model?)



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