A comparative architectural study of three MIMD computing surfaces

The performance of three MIMD message-passing computing surfaces have been investigated in the paper. These three computing surfaces are the augmented torus, the torus and the grid-bus. The three computing surfaces are closely related in hardware implementation. First, the generalised stochastic Petri nets (GSPN) model has been used to predict the performance of the three computing surfaces probabilistically. Secondly, the deterministic modelling schemes are used to evaluate the performance of the three computing surfaces for a two-dimensional fast Fourier transform (FFT) problem. Two modelling methods generate the same conclusion. The augmented torus has better performance than the torus and the grid-bus. The application ranges of these three computing surfaces are discussed.