Title :
An initial evaluation of the Convex SPP-1000 for earth and space science applications
Author :
Sterling, Thomas Lawrence ; Savarese, Daniel E. ; Merkey, Phillip R. ; Gardner, Jeffrey P.
Author_Institution :
Center of Excellence in Space Data & Inf. Sci., NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA
Abstract :
The Convex SPP-1000, the most recent SPC, is distinguished by a true global shared memory capability based on the first commercial version of directory based cache coherence mechanisms and SCI protocol. The system was evaluated at NASA/GSFC in the Beta-test environment using three classes of operational experiments targeting earth and space science applications. A multiple program workload tested job-stream level parallelism. Synthetic programs measured overhead costs of barrier, fork-join, and message passing synchronization primitives. An efficient tree-code version of an N-body simulation revealed scaling properties and measured the overall efficiency. This paper presents the results of this study and provides the earliest published evaluation of this new scalable architecture
Keywords :
aerospace computing; geophysics computing; message passing; performance evaluation; shared memory systems; synchronisation; Beta-test environment; Convex SPP-1000; N-body simulation; SCI protocol; cache coherence mechanisms; earth and space science applications; fork-join; job-stream level parallelism; message passing synchronization; multiple program workload; shared memory capability; tree-code version; Concurrent computing; Earth; Extraterrestrial measurements; Geoscience; Hardware; High performance computing; Microprocessors; NASA; Parallel processing; Protocols;
Conference_Titel :
High-Performance Computer Architecture, 1995. Proceedings., First IEEE Symposium on
Conference_Location :
Raleigh, NC
Print_ISBN :
0-8186-6445-2
DOI :
10.1109/HPCA.1995.386544
