Communication on the fly and program execution control in a system of dynamically configurable SMP clusters

New architectural solutions for parallel systems built of bus-based shared memory processor clusters are presented. A new paradigm is proposed for interprocessor communication, called communication on the fly. With this paradigm, processors can be dynamically switched between clusters at program run-time to bring in their caches data that can be read by many processors in a cluster at the same time they are written to the cluster memory. A cache controlled macro data flow program execution paradigm is also proposed. Programs are structured into tasks for which all required data are brought to the processor data cache before task execution. A. new graph representation of programs is introduced, which enables modeling of functioning of data caches, memories, bus arbiters, processor switching between clusters and parallel reads of data on the fly. This representation is used for realistic simulation of a numerical algorithm execution based on distribution of parallel tasks between dynamic SMP clusters and on communication on the fly. Performance evaluation results are presented for different configurations of the programs and shared memory clusters in the system.