| 1 |
Choice of Node is a dominant issue?
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RISC nodes SGI Challenge, IBM SP-2, Convex, Cray T3D with MIPS, IBM HP and Digital workstation chips respectively
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Special purpose nodes -- CM-5, Paragon, Meiko CS-2 -- out of favor as non competitive
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"old" nodes -- nCUBE-2
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small nodes Caltech Mosaic which is basis of Myrianet J Machine (Dally at MIT) Execube (Kogge - Loral ex IBM)
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| 2 |
Network Topology as described is not very important today?
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Theoretical issues obscured by technology and implementation
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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.)
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| 3 |
However we still have two major types of network:
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Distributed Shared Memory -- physically distributed memory but hardware support for shared memory as in SGI and Convex machines
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Pure Distributed Memory as in IBM SP-2 or network of workstations
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