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The Meerkat multicomputer: tradeoffs in multicomputer architecture
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Bedichek, Robert C. |
| Copyright Year | 1995 |
| Abstract | The Meerkat Multicomputer: Tradeoffs in Multicomputer Architecture by Robert C. Bedichek Co-Chairpersons of Supervisory Committee: Professor Henry M. Levy Professor Edward D. Lazowska Department of Computer Science and Engineering A central problem preventing the wide application of distributed memory multicomputers has been their high price, especially for small installations. High prices are due to long design times, support for scaling to thousands of nodes, and high production costs. This thesis demonstrates a new approach that combines some carefully chosen restrictions on scaling with a software-intensive methodology. We used a concrete design, Meerkat, as a vehicle for exploring the multicomputer design space. Meerkat is a distributed memory multicomputer architecture effective in the range from several to hundreds of processors. It uses a two-dimensional, passive backplane to connect nodes composed of processors, memory, and I/O devices. The interconnect is conceptually simple, inexpensive to design and build, has low latency, and provides high bandwidth on long messages. However, it does not scale to thousands of processors, provide high bandwidth on short messages, or implement cache coherent shared memory. This thesis describes Meerkat’s architecture, the niche that Meerkat fills, and the rationale for our design choices. We present performance results obtained from our hardware prototype and a calibrated simulator to demonstrate that parallel numerical workloads work well on Meerkat. |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://www.arctic.org/~robert/dissertation/thesis.ps |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://www.cs.washington.edu/tr/1994/06/UW-CSE-94-06-06.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |