An initial evaluation of the Convex SPP-1000 for earth and space science applications

Author

Sterling, Thomas Lawrence ; Savarese, Daniel E. ; Merkey, Phillip R. ; Gardner, Jeffrey P.

Author_Institution

Center of Excellence in Space Data & Inf. Sci., NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA

fYear

1995

fDate

1995

Firstpage

176

Lastpage

185

Abstract

The Convex SPP-1000, the most recent SPC, is distinguished by a true global shared memory capability based on the first commercial version of directory based cache coherence mechanisms and SCI protocol. The system was evaluated at NASA/GSFC in the Beta-test environment using three classes of operational experiments targeting earth and space science applications. A multiple program workload tested job-stream level parallelism. Synthetic programs measured overhead costs of barrier, fork-join, and message passing synchronization primitives. An efficient tree-code version of an N-body simulation revealed scaling properties and measured the overall efficiency. This paper presents the results of this study and provides the earliest published evaluation of this new scalable architecture

Keywords

aerospace computing; geophysics computing; message passing; performance evaluation; shared memory systems; synchronisation; Beta-test environment; Convex SPP-1000; N-body simulation; SCI protocol; cache coherence mechanisms; earth and space science applications; fork-join; job-stream level parallelism; message passing synchronization; multiple program workload; shared memory capability; tree-code version; Concurrent computing; Earth; Extraterrestrial measurements; Geoscience; Hardware; High performance computing; Microprocessors; NASA; Parallel processing; Protocols;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

High-Performance Computer Architecture, 1995. Proceedings., First IEEE Symposium on

Conference_Location

Raleigh, NC

Print_ISBN

0-8186-6445-2

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/HPCA.1995.386544

Filename

386544