Basic HTML version of Foils prepared 19 September 1997

Foil 52 Granularity of Parallel Components - II

From Master Set of Foils for 1997 Session of CPS615 CPS615 Basic Simulation Track for Computational Science -- Fall Semester 97. by Geoffrey C. Fox


Fine-grain: Thousands to perhaps millions of small pieces, executed by very small, simple processors (several per chip) or through pipelines.
  • Processors often have instructions broadcasted to them.
  • Computation/ Communication ratio often near unity.
  • Typical of SIMD but seen in a few MIMD systems such as Kogge's Execube, Dally's J Machine or commercial Myrianet (Seitz)
  • This is going to be very important in future petaflop architectures as the dense chips of year 2003 onwards favor this Processor in Memory Architecture
  • So many "transistors" in future chips that "small processors" of the "future" will be similar to todays high end microprocessors
  • As chips get denser, not realistic to put processors and memories on separate chips as granularities become too big
Note that a machine of given granularity can be used on algorithms of the same or finer granularity



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