Basic HTML version of Foils prepared 21 October 1995

Foil 6 Parallel Computer Architecture Issues

From New CPS615 Foils-- B 28 August 95 CPS615 Basic Simulation Track for Computational Science -- Fall Semester 95. by Geoffrey C. Fox
Two critical Issues are:
Memory Structure
  • Distributed
  • Shared
  • Cached
and Heterogeneous mixtures
Control and synchronization
SIMD -lockstep synchronization
MIMD -synchronization can take several forms
  • Simplest: program controlled message passing
  • "Flags" in memory - typical shared memory construct
  • Special hardware - as in cache and its coherency (coordination between nodes)

© on Tue Oct 7 1997