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)
|
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.)
|
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
|
