Software and hardware support for workstation-based supercomputing

The presented research has two main objectives: (1) to investigate the limitations of communications techniques used in current workstations-based systems and to identify a set of requirements that must be satisfied to achieve workstation-based supercomputing; and (2) to use these requirements to develop software and hardware support that makes workstation-based supercomputing possible. The performance of two applications, the LU factorization of dense matrices and the calculation of the fast Fourier transform, on two platforms, The iPSC/860 supercomputer and a cluster of general-purpose workstations, is used in the analysis to identify the limitations of current workstation clusters and to show that if these limitations are overcome, the clusters can provide comparable performance to that offered by an expensive supercomputer.