Experimental analysis of communication/data-conditional aspects of a mixed-mode parallel architecture via synthetic computations

  • Authors:

  • Samuel A. Fineberg;Thomas L. Casavant;Howard Jay Siegel

  • Affiliations:

  • Parallel Processing Laboratory, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA;Parallel Processing Laboratory, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA;Parallel Processing Laboratory, School of Electrical Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 1990 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing
  • Year:
  • 1990

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Abstract

Experimentation aimed at determining the potential benefit of mixed-mode SIMD/MIMD parallel architectures is reported. The experimentation is based on timing measurements made on the PASM system prototype at Purdue utilizing carefully coded synthetic variations of a well-known algorithm. The synthetic algorithms used to measure and evaluate this system were based on bitonic sorting of sequences stored in the processing elements. This computation was mapped to both the SIMD and MIMD modes of parallelism, as well as two hybrids of the SIMD and MIMD modes. The computations were coded in these four ways and experiments were performed that explore the trade-offs among them. The results of these experiments are presented and are discussed with special consideration of the effects of the system's architecture. The goal is to (as much as possible) obtain implementation independent analyses of the attributes of mixed-mode parallel processing with respect to the computational characteristics of the application being examined. The results are used to gain insight into the impact of computation mode on synchronization and data-conditional aspects of system performance.