Basic HTML version of Foils prepared August 4 1996

Foil 6 Geometric Structure of Problems and Computers

From Summary of Working Groups at PAWS and PetaSoft Meetings PAWS(Mandalay Beach) and PetSoft(Bodega Bay) -- April 23 and June 17-19,96. by Geoffrey C. Fox


1 On some original MPP's (e.g. hypercubes) one worried about nearest neighbor structure of algorithms so could match geometric structure of computers and problems.
2 This became unnecessary and all that matters on most machines today is data locality
  • e.g. on machines like IBM SP-2, on processor and off processor memory access times are very different but there is no difference between the different processors once you go off CPU
3 The year 2005 machines seem different as machine geometry seems relevant especially in PIM designs with physical transit time important as clock speeds increase.

in Table To:


Northeast Parallel Architectures Center, Syracuse University, npac@npac.syr.edu

If you have any comments about this server, send e-mail to webmaster@npac.syr.edu.

Page produced by wwwfoil on Sun Apr 11 1999