17 Jul
1998
17 Jul
'98
4:14 a.m.
On Fri, 17 Jul 1998, Doug Yowza wrote:
So, in theory, a 5-cube with 32 processors could run
up to 32 times faster
than a single-CPU computer. In practice, communication overhead between
the nodes can kill performance, and it's not always easy to (re)structure
a problem to take advantage of the parallelism.
Communication channel limitations aside, isn't the computational increase
supposed to be exponential, rather than simply geometrical (or is that
arithmatical?)
I never worked directly with transputers, but I think
the topology was
pretty similar, and the operating environment was based on something
called Occam. Somebody else with Occam experience should chime in
here, but it was basically a language and underlying multiprocess OS that
allowed programs to automatically scale to as many processors as were
present.
Are you listening Rax?
Sam Alternate e-mail: dastar(a)siconic.com
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