Can I read The MIT Alewife machine: architecture and performance on EtoBox?

The MIT Alewife machine: architecture and performance by Anant Agarwal; Ricardo Bianchini; David Chaiken; Kirk L. Johnson; David Kranz; John Kubiatowicz; Beng-Hong Lim; Kenneth Mackenzie; Donald Yeung is a scholarly article available to read on EtoBox.

What is The MIT Alewife machine: architecture and performance about?

Alewife is a multiprocessor architecture that supports up to 512 processing nodes connected over a scalable and cost-effective mesh network at a constant cost per node. The MIT Alewife machine, a prototype implementation of the architecture, demonstrates that a parallel system can be both scalable and programmable. Four mechanisms combine to achieve these goals: software-extended coherent shared memory provides a global, linear address space; integrated message passing allows compiler and operating system designers to provide efficient communication and synchronization; support for fine-grain computation allows many processors to cooperate on small problem sizes; and latency tolerance mechanisms -including block multithreading and prefetching -mask unavoidable delays due to communication. Microbenchmarks, together with over a dozen complete applications running on the 32-node prototype, help to analyze the behavior of the system. Analysis shows that integrating message passing with shared memory enables a cost-efficient solution to the cache coherence problem and provides a rich set of programming primitives. Block multithreading and prefetching improve performance by up to 2597. i

Author

Anant Agarwal; Ricardo Bianchini; David Chaiken; Kirk L. Johnson; David Kranz; John Kubiatowicz; Beng-Hong Lim; Kenneth Mackenzie; Donald Yeung

Publisher

ACM Press

Published

1995

Language

EN