Basic HTML version of Foils prepared 21 October 1995

Foil 31 Some MIMD Architecture Issues

From New CPS615 Foils-- B 28 August 95 CPS615 Basic Simulation Track for Computational Science -- Fall Semester 95. by Geoffrey C. Fox


1 Choice of Node is a dominant issue?
  • RISC nodes SGI Challenge, IBM SP-2, Convex, Cray T3D with MIPS, IBM HP and Digital workstation chips respectively
  • Special purpose nodes -- CM-5, Paragon, Meiko CS-2 -- out of favor as non competitive
  • "old" nodes -- nCUBE-2
  • small nodes Caltech Mosaic which is basis of Myrianet J Machine (Dally at MIT) Execube (Kogge - Loral ex IBM)
2 Network Topology as described is not very important today?
  • Theoretical issues obscured by technology and implementation
  • Details of network can be and are hidden from user and compiler by simple elegant (message passing) software including collective communication primitives (broadcast, reduction, etc.)
3 However we still have two major types of network:
  • Distributed Shared Memory -- physically distributed memory but hardware support for shared memory as in SGI and Convex machines
  • Pure Distributed Memory as in IBM SP-2 or network of workstations

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© on Tue Oct 7 1997