Title:
Scalability Study of the KSR-1
Scalability Study of the KSR-1
Author(s)
Ramachandran, Umakishore
Shah, Gautam H.
Ravikumar, S.
Muthukumarasamy, Jeyakumar
Shah, Gautam H.
Ravikumar, S.
Muthukumarasamy, Jeyakumar
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Abstract
Scalability of parallel architectures is an interesting area of
current research. Shared memory parallel programming is attractive stemming
from its relative ease in transitioning from sequential programming.
However, there has been concern in the architectural community regarding the
scalability of shared memory parallel architectures owing to the potential
for large latencies for remote memory accesses. KSR-1 is a recently
introduced commercial shared memory parallel architecture, and the
scalability of KSR-1 is the focus of this research. The study is conducted
using a range of experiments spanning latency measurements, synchronization,
and analysis of parallel algorithms for two computational kernels. The key
conclusions from this study are as follows: The communication network of
KSR-1, a pipelined unidirectional ring, is fairly resilient in supporting
simultaneous remote memory accesses from several processors. The multiple
communication paths realized through this pipelining help in the efficient
implementation of tournament-style barrier synchronization algorithms.
Parallel algorithms that have fairly regular and contiguous data access
patterns scale well on this architecture. The architectural features of
KSR-1 such as the poststore and prefetch are useful for boosting the
performance of parallel applications. The sizes of the caches available at
each node may be too small for efficiently implementing large data
structures. The network does saturate when there are simultaneous remote
memory accesses from a fully populated (32 node) ring.
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Date Issued
1993
Extent
247228 bytes
Resource Type
Text
Resource Subtype
Technical Report