Distributing hot-spot addressing in large-scale multiprocessors

Journal Article · Wed Apr 01 04:00:00 EST 1987 · IEEE Trans. Comput.; (United States)

OSTI ID:6624924

Yew, P C; Tzeng, N F; Lawrie, D H

When a large number of processors try to access a common variable, referred to as hot-spot accesses, not only can the resulting memory contention seriously degrade performance, but it can also cause tree saturation in the interconnection network which blocks both hot and regular requests alike. It is shown that even if only a small percentage of all requests are to a hot-spot, these requests can cause very serious performance problems, and networks that do the necessary combining of requests are suggested to keep the interconnection network and memory contention from becoming a bottleneck. The authors propose a software combining tree, and they show that it is effective in decreasing memory contention and preventing tree saturation because it distributes hot-spot accesses over a software tree whose nodes can be dispersed over many memory modules. Thus, it is an inexpensive alternative to expensive combining networks.

• Research Organization: Center for Supercomputing Research and Development, Univ. of Illinois, Urbana, IL 61801
• OSTI ID: 6624924
• Journal Information: IEEE Trans. Comput.; (United States), Journal Name: IEEE Trans. Comput.; (United States) Vol. C-36:4; ISSN ITCOB
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS
990210* -- Supercomputers-- (1987-1989)
ARRAY PROCESSORS
COMMUNICATIONS
COMPUTER CODES
DATA PROCESSING
DATA TRANSMISSION
DISTRIBUTED DATA PROCESSING
MEMORY DEVICES
PERFORMANCE
PROCESSING
SYNCHRONIZATION