Separate HTML for Basic Foil 34 Some Major Hardware Architectures

Basic HTML version of Foils prepared 10 Sept 1996

Foil 34 Some Major Hardware Architectures - MIMD

From New CPS615Master Foils-- 26 August 96 Basic Simulation Track for Computational Science CPS615 -- Fall Semester 96. by Geoffrey C. Fox

MIMD Distributed Memory

This is now best illustrated by a collection of computers on a network (i.e. a metacomputer)

MIMD with logically shared memory but usually physically distributed. The latter is sometimes called distributed shared memory.

In near future, ALL formal (closely coupled) MPP's will be distributed shared memory
Note all computers (e.g. current MIMD distributed memory IBM SP2) allow any node to get at any memory but this is done indirectly -- you send a message
In future "closely-coupled" machines, there will be built in hardware supporting the function that any node can directly address all memory of the system
This distributed shared memory architecture is currently of great interest to (a major challenge for) parallel compilers