Scalability Study of the KSR-1

Scalability of parallel architectures is an interesting area of current research. Shared memory parallel programming is attractive stemming from its relative ease in transitioning from sequential programming. However, there has been concern in the architectural community regarding the scalability of shared memory parallel architectures owing to the potential for large latencies for remote memory accesses. KSR-1 is a commercial shared memory parallel architecture, and the scalability of KSR-1 is the focus of this research. The study is conducted using a range of experiments spanning latency measurements, synchronization, and analysis of parallel algorithms for three computational kernels and an application. The key conclusions from this study are as follows: The communication network of KSR-1, a pipelined unidirectional ring, is fairly resilient in supporting simultaneous remote memory accesses from several processors. The multiple communication paths realized through this pipelining h...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1993
• Where: ICPP
• Authors: Umakishore Ramachandran, Gautam Shah, Ravi Kumar, Jeyakumar Muthukumarasamy
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, ICPP 1993, Parallel Architecture, Remote Memory Accesses, Shared Memory Parallel