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3.6 Compound Complex Systems

 

In Sections 3.4 and 3.5, we discussed basic characteristics of complex systems. In fact, many ``real world examples'' are a mixture of these fundamental architectures. This is illustrated by Figure 3.10, which shows a very conventional computer network with several different architectures. We cannot only regard each individual computer as a complex system but the whole network is, of course, a single complex system as we have defined it. We will term such complex systems compound. Note that one often puts together a network of resources to solve a ``single problem'' and so an analysis of the structure of compound complex systems is not an academic issue, but of practical importance.

  
Figure 3.10: A Heterogeneous Compound Complex System Corresponding to a Network of Computers of Disparate Architectures

Figure 3.10 shows a mixture of temporal, synchronous and asynchronous, and spatial, hypercube, and von Neumann architectures. We can look at both the architecture of the individual network components or, taking a higher level view, look at the network itself with member computers, such as the hypercube in Figure 3.10, viewed as ``black boxes.'' In this example, the network is an asynchronous complex system and this seems quite a common circumstance. Figure 3.11 shows two compound problems  coming from the aerospace and battle management fields, respectively. In each case we link asynchronously problem modules which are synchronous, loosely synchronous, or asynchronous. We have found this very common. In scientific and engineering computations, the basic modules are usually synchronous or loosely synchronous. These modules have large spatial size and naturally support ``massive data parallelism.'' Rarely do we find large asynchronous modules; this is fortunate as such complex systems are difficult to parallelize. However, in many cases the synchronous or loosely synchronous program modules are hierarchically combined with an asynchronous architecture. This is an important way in which the asynchronous problem architecture  is used in large scale computations. This is explored in detail in Chapter 18. One has come to refer to systems such as those in Figure 3.10 as metacomputers.  Correspondingly, we designate the applications in Figure 3.11 metaproblems. 

  
Figure: Two Heterogeneous Complex Systems Corresponding to: a) the Integrated Design of a New Aircraft, and b) the Integrated Battle Management Problem Discussed in Chapter 18

If we combine Figures 3.10 and 3.11, we can formulate the process of computation in its most general complicated fashion.

``Map a compound heterogeneous problem onto a compound heterogeneous computer.''



next up previous contents index
Next: 3.7 Mapping Complex Systems Up: 3 A Methodology for Previous: 3.5 Spatial Properties of



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