The Meerkat multicomputer

Author

Bedichek, Robert ; Brown, Curtis

Author_Institution

Dept. of Comput. Sci. & Eng., Washington Univ., USA

fYear

1993

fDate

1-4 Dec 1993

Firstpage

28

Lastpage

36

Abstract

Meerkat is a distributed memory multicomputer architecture that scales to hundreds of processors. Meerkat uses at two dimensional passive backplane to connect nodes composed of processors, memory, and I/O devices. The interconnect is conceptually simple, inexpensive to design and build, has low latency, and provides high bandwidth on long messages. However, it does not scale to thousands of processors, does not provide cache coherent shared memory. Our hypothesis is that many general-purpose, database, and parallel numerical workloads work well on systems with Meerkat´s characteristics. We describe the Meerkat architecture, the niche that Meerkat fills, the motivation behind our design choices, and give performance results obtained from our hardware prototype and a calibrated simulator

Keywords

distributed memory systems; memory architecture; multiprocessor interconnection networks; performance evaluation; system buses; I/O devices; Meerkat architecture; Meerkat multicomputer; calibrated simulator; database workloads; distributed memory multicomputer architecture; general purpose workloads; hardware prototype; high bandwidth; interconnect; long messages; low latency; memory; parallel numerical workloads; performance results; processors; two dimensional passive backplane; Backplanes; Bandwidth; Computational modeling; Computer architecture; Computer science; Costs; Delay; Hardware; Memory architecture; Virtual prototyping;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Parallel and Distributed Processing, 1993. Proceedings of the Fifth IEEE Symposium on

Conference_Location

Dallas, TX

Print_ISBN

0-8186-4222-X

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/SPDP.1993.395554

Filename

395554