Benchmarking parallel architectures

In the developing world of parallel processing, there is a fundamental reason for benchmarking. The prime motivation for parallelism is better exploitation of VLSI technology and the role of benchmarking is wider than mere customer evaluation: it is needed to guide the improvement of parallel machines and the genesis of new parallel architectures. The author looks at the problems of benchmarking parallel architectures, and evaluates two strongly differentiated parallel architectures for evaluation (i) the SIMD processor array Mil-DAP, developed jointly by ICL and RSRE from the ICL Distributed Array Processor (DAP) (now re-designed as the AMT DAP-500, which is 1.4 times faster than Mil-DAP), and (ii) networks of T414 Transputers, including a Meiko computing surface and prototypes of the reconfigurable RTP machine