A distributed resource management mechanism for a partitionable multiprocessor system

A resource-management mechanism is presented for a multiprocessor system consisting of a pool of homogeneous processing elements interconnected by multistage networks. The mechanism aims at making effective use of hardware resources of the multiprocessor system in support of high-performance parallel computations. It can create many physically independent subsystems simultaneously without incurring internal fragmentation,. Each subsystem can configure itself to form a desired topology for matching the structure of the parallel computation. The mechanism is distributed in nature; it is divided into three functionally disjoint procedures that can reside in different loci for handling various resource-management tasks concurrently. Simulation results show that, by eliminating internal fragmentation, the mechanism achieves better source utilization than a reference machine