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Next: 2.2.6 Parallel Systems-1992 Up: 2.2 Hardware Trends Previous: 2.2.4 Mid-1980s

2.2.5 Late 1980s

By the late 1980s, truly powerful parallel systems began to appear. The Meiko  system at Edinburgh University, is an example; by 1989, that computer had 400 T800s [Wallace:88a]. The system was being used for a number of traditional scientific computations in physics, chemistry,  engineering, and other areas [Wexler:89a]. The system software for transputer-based systems had evolved to resemble the message-passing system software available on hypercubes. Although the transputer's two-dimensional mesh connection is in principle less efficient than hypercube connections, for systems of moderate size (only a few hundred processors), the difference is not significant for most applications. Further, any parallel architecture deficiencies were counterbalanced by the transputer's excellent communication channel performance.

Three new SIMD  fine-grain systems were introduced in the late 1980s: the CM-2, the MasPar,  and a new version of the DAP. The CM-2 is a version of the original Connection Machine  [Hillis:85a;87a] that has been enhanced with Weitek floating-point units, one for each 32 single-bit processors, and optional large memory. In its largest configuration, such as is installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory, there are 64K single-bit processors, 2048 64-bit floating-point processors, and of memory. The CM-2 has been measured at running the unlimited Linpack benchmark solving a linear system of order 26,624 and even higher performance on some applications, e.g., seismic  data processing [Myczkowski:91a] and QCD [Brickner:91b], [Liu:91a]. It has attracted widespread attention both because of its extremely high performance and its relative ease of use [Boghosian:90a], [Hillis:86a;87b]. For problems that are naturally data parallel, the CM Fortran language and compiler provide a relatively easy way to implement programs and get high performance.

The MasPar and the DAP are smaller systems that are aimed more at excellent price performance than at supercomputer levels of performance. The new DAP is front-ended by Sun workstations or VAXes. This makes it much more affordable and compatible with modern computing environments than when it required an ICL front end. DAPs have been built in ruggedized versions that can be put into vehicles, flown in airplanes, and used on ships, and have found many uses in signal processing and military applications. They are also used for general scientific work. The MasPar is the newest SIMD system. Its architecture constitutes an evolutionary approach of fine-grain SIMD combined with enhanced floating-point performance coming from the use of 4-bit (Maspar MP-1) or 32-bit (Maspar MP-2) basic SIMD units. Standard 64-bit floating-point algorithms implemented on a (SIMD) machine built around an l bit CPU take time of order machine instructions. The DAP and CM-1,2 used l=1 and here the CM-2 and later DAP models achieve floating-point performance with special extra hardware rather than by increasing l.

Two hypercubes became available just as the decade ended: the second generation nCUBE,  popularly known as the nCUBE-2, and the Intel iPSC/860. The nCUBE-2 can be configured with up to 8K nodes; that configuration would have a peak speed of . Each processor is still on a single chip along with all the communications channels, but it is about eight times faster than its predecessor-a little over . Communication bandwidth  is also a factor of eight higher. The result is a potentially very powerful system. The nCUBE-2 has a custom microprocessor that is instruction-compatible with the first-generation system. The largest system known to have been built to date is a 1024 system installed at Sandia National Laboratories. The unlimited size Linpack benchmark for this system yielded a performance of solving a linear system of order 21,376.

The second hypercube introduced in 1989 (and first shipped to a customer, Oak Ridge, in January 1990), the Intel iPSC/860,  has a peak speed of over . While the communication speed between nodes is very low compared to the speed of the i860 processor, high speeds can be achieved for problems that do not require extensive communication or when the data movement is planned carefully. For example, the unlimited size Linpack benchmark on the largest configuration iPSC/860, 128 processors, ran at when solving a system of order 8,600.

The iPSC/860 uses the Intel i860 microprocessor, which has a peak speed of full precision and with 32-bit precision. In mid-1991, a follow-on to Intel iPSC/860, the Intel Touchstone Delta  System, reached a Linpack speed of for a system of order 25,000. This was done on 512 i860 nodes of the Delta System. This machine has a peak speed of and of memory and is a one-of-a-kind system built for a consortium of institutions and installed at California Institute of Technology. Although the CP project is finished at Caltech, many CP applications have very successfully used the Delta. The Delta uses a two-dimensional mesh connection scheme with mesh routing chips instead of a hypercube connection scheme. The Intel Paragon,  a commercial product that is the successor to the iPSC/860 and the Touchstone Delta, became available in the fall of 1992. The Paragon has the same connection scheme as the Delta. Its maximum configuration is 4096 nodes. It uses a second generation version of the i860 microprocessor and has a peak speed of .

The BBN TC2000  is another important system introduced in the late 1980s. It provides a shared-memory programming environment supported by hardware. It uses a multistage switch based on crossbars that connect processor memory pairs to each other [Karplus:87a, pp. 137-146], [BBN:87a]. The BBN TC2000 uses Motorola 88000 Series processors. The ratio of speeds between access to data in cache, to data respectively in the memory local to a processor, and to data in some other processor's memory, is approximately one, three and seven. Therefore, there is a noticeable but not prohibitive penalty for using another processor's memory. The architecture is scalable to over 500 processors, although none was built of that size. Each processor can have a substantial amount of memory, and the operating system environment is considered attractive. This system is one of the few commercial shared-memory MIMD computers that can scale to large numbers of nodes. It is no longer in production; the BBN Corporation terminated its parallel computer activities in 1991.



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Next: 2.2.6 Parallel Systems-1992 Up: 2.2 Hardware Trends Previous: 2.2.4 Mid-1980s



Guy Robinson
Wed Mar 1 10:19:35 EST 1995