Parallel Supercomputing in MIMD Architectures

by R.Michael Hord

MIMD supercomputers, software, and issues
Parallel Supercomputing in MIMD Architectures is devoted to supercomputing on a wide variety of Multiple-Instruction-Multiple-Data (MIMD)-class parallel machines. The book describes architectural concepts, commercial and research hardware implementations, major programming concepts, algorithmic methods, representative applications, and benefits and drawbacks. Commercial machines described include Connection Machine 5, NCUBE, Butterfly, Meiko, Intel iPSC, iPSC/2 and iWarp, DSP3, Multimax, Sequent, and Teradata. Research machines covered include the J-Machine, PAX, Concert, and ASP.

Operating systems, languages, translating sequential programs to parallel, and semiautomatic parallelizing are aspects of MIMD software addressed in Parallel Supercomputing in MIMD Architectures. MIMD issues such as scalability, partitioning, processor utilization, and heterogenous networks are discussed as well.

Packed with important information and richly illustrated with diagrams and tables, Parallel Supercomputing in MIMD Architectures is an essential reference for computer professionals, program managers, applications system designers, scientists, engineers, and students in the computer sciences.

432 pages, Hardcover

First published February 22, 1993

Reviews

[Nick Black · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good literature survey, detailing the great MIMD machines of the twentieth century's last score years: the J-Machine, the CM-5, the iWarp and a beautiful hexagonal unidirectional systolic lattice thereof, the simple elegance of the nCUBE ("Two NCUBE networks of the same dimension can be merged to form an NCUBE network of the next dimension", though of course we have only three dimensions within which to embed, and thus the mundane problem of wiring comes to the forefront, especially due to the NCUBE's single clock) and the logarithmic fanout, the Butterfly network (no mention of Omega, Delta etc networks), the introduction of NI's and flits to the literature. The latter portion, covering MIMD technique, is rather too dated to be useful -- better literature collections are available in David Bader's Petascale Computing or SIAM's Parallel Processing for Scientific Computing.

Excellent coverage of systolic machines and effects of interconnect topology upon dataflow algorithms; this was the height of their popularity.

Students new to the field would be better off consulting Foster's Designing and Building Parallel Programs and Shavit's The Art of Multiprocessor Programming.