Skip to main content
U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

Performance comparison of four state-of-the-art computer architectures. Master's thesis

Technical Report ·
OSTI ID:6459528

This study determined the relative performance trends of sequential, vector, and multiprocessor architectures solving computationally intense problems. The problem time complexity of sequential matrix multiplication and inversion algorithms on a Cyber 845, a Vax-11/785, and a Cray X-MP/12 were compared with parallelizations of the algorithms on an Intel Personal Supercomputer (iPSC). In addition, sequential and parallel sort algorithms were run on the Vax and iPSC, respectively. The implementations were run with a range of data sizes. The relative time complexities were determined by computing the factor of execution time increase in relation to the factor of data size increase. By analyzing the problem time complexity, the machine-specific influences on execution speed were partially accounted for, thus enabling generalizations to the corresponding architectural classes to be drawn. It was shown that the multiprocessor was the only architecture to allow a reduction in the problem time complexity, and speedups from vector operations were constant.

Research Organization:
Air Force Inst. of Tech., Wright-Patterson AFB, OH (USA). School of Engineering
OSTI ID:
6459528
Report Number(s):
AD-A-179071/6/XAB; AFIT/GCS/ENG-86D-17
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English