Basic HTML version of Foils prepared August 4 1996

Foil 9 Observation on Parallelism -- Burton Smith

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


Observation on Parallelism
Consider what level of parallelism will be required for the proposed superconducting system:
It will have 1024 processors, each with a clock frequency that is some 4000 times faster than the operational speed of DRAM main memory.
For main memory intensive applications, at least 4000 threads, such as a 4000-long vector of data, must be streaming through each CPU.
This means that the minimum level of parallelism required is 1024 x 4000 = 4 million.
Conclusion: One of the key advantages of a superconducting system will not be met unless large amounts of superconducting memory is included in the system, enough so that the fetches to main memory are relatively infrequent.



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