Suitability of message-passing computers for implementing production systems
Two important parallel architecture types are the shared-memory architectures and the message-passing architectures. In the past, researchers working on the parallel implementations of production systems have focused either on shared-memory multiprocessors or on special-purpose architectures. Message-passing computers have not been studied. The main reasons have been the large message-passing latency (as large as a few milliseconds) and high message reception overheads (several hundred microseconds) exhibited by the first-generation message-passing computers. These overheads are too large for the parallel implementation of production systems, where it is necessary to exploit parallelism at a very fine granularity to obtain significant speed-up (subtasks execute about 100 machine instructions).
- Research Organization:
- Stanford Univ., CA (USA). Dept. of Computer Science
- OSTI ID:
- 5626075
- Report Number(s):
- AD-A-207321/1/XAB
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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