Basic HTML version of Foils prepared 23 August 1998

Foil 28 Distributed Memory Machines -- Notes

From CPS615-Introduction-Course,Driving Technology and HPCC Current Status and Futures CPS615 Basic Simulation Track for Computational Science -- Fall Semester 98. by Geoffrey C. Fox, (Some Culler, Koelbel material)
1 Conceptually, the nCUBE CM-5 Paragon SP-2 Beowulf PC cluster are quite similar.
  • Bandwidth and latency of interconnects different
  • The network topology is a two-dimensional torus for Paragon, fat tree for CM-5, hypercube for nCUBE and Switch for SP-2
2 To program these machines:
  • Divide the problem to minimize number of messages while retaining parallelism
  • Convert all references to global structures into references to local pieces (explicit messages convert distant to local variables)
  • Optimization: Pack messages together to reduce fixed overhead (almost always needed)
  • Optimization: Carefully schedule messages (usually done by library)
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