Pc-based Shared Memory Architecture and Language

  • Authors:
  • Dominique Houzet;Abdelkrim Fatni

  • Affiliations:
  • IRIT-ENSEEIHT-INP, 2, rue Camichel, 31071 Toulouse cedex, France E-mail: houzet@enseeiht.fr;IRIT-ENSEEIHT-INP, 2, rue Camichel, 31071 Toulouse cedex, France E-mail: fatni@enseeiht.fr

  • Venue:
  • The Journal of Supercomputing
  • Year:
  • 1998

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Abstract

The Image Processing applications require both computing andcommunication power. The object of the GFLOPS project was to study allaspects concerning the design of such computers. The project‘s aim was todevelop a parallel architecture as well as its software environment toimplement these applications efficiently. A development environment,especially a C data-parallel language, has been built for this purpose. TheC parallel language presented here, simplifies the use of such architecturesby providing the programmer with a global name space and a control mechanismto exploit fine and medium grain parallelism of its applications. The mainadvantage of our paradigm is that it allows a unique framework to expressboth data and control parallelism. We have implemented this programmingenvironment on the GFLOPS machine which supports up to 512 processor nodes,which are PC mother boards, connected over a scaleable and cost-effectivenetwork, via the PCI-bus, at a constant cost per node. The aim is to obtainat low cost a scaleable virtually shared memory machine. In this paper wediscuss the design of the GFLOPS machine and its C parallel language, andevaluate the effectiveness of the mechanisms incorporated. The analysis ofthe architecture‘s behaviour was conducted with microbenchmarks and imageprocessing algorithms, written in C.