Basic HTML version of Foils prepared 27 August 1997

Foil 37 Parallel Computing Rationale

From CPS615-Introduction-Course,Driving Technology and HPCC Current Status and Futures CPS615 Basic Simulation Track for Computational Science -- Fall Semester 97. by Geoffrey C. Fox


1 Transistors are getting cheaper and cheaper and it only takes some 0.5 million transistors to make a very high quality CPU
  • Essentially impossible to increase clock speed and so must exploit increasing transistor density in figure of merit (1/f)2-4
2 Already we build chips with some factor of ten more transistors than this and this is used for "automatic" instruction level parallelism.
  • This corresponds to parallelism in "innermost loops"
3 However getting much more speedup than this requires use of "outer loop" or data parallelism.
4 Actually memory bandwidth is an essential problem in any computer as doing more computations per second requires accessing more memory cells per second!
  • Harder for sequential than parallel computers
  • Data locality is unifying concept!

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