------------------------------------------------------------------------------- B O S T O N U N I V E R S I T Y Computer Science Department C O L L O Q U I U M Wednesday January 25, 1995 3:00pm (Coffee served at 2:30pm) Seminar Room / MCS 135 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The MIT Alewife Machine: A Scalable, Distributed Shared Memory Multiprocessor Anant Agarwal Laboratory for Computer Science Massachusetts Institute of Technology 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. Four classes of mechanisms in the machine combine to achieve its goals of scalability and programmability: 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; block multithreading and prefetching helps mask unavoidable delays due to internode communication; and support for fine-grain computation allows many processors to cooperate on relatively small problem sizes. Alewife machine prototypes have been operational since May 1994. A compiler for parallel ANSI C and Mul-T, an Alewife GDB debugger, a graphical statistics interface, and a SCSI disk interface are in daily use. Several applications including those from the Splash suite run on Alewife. This talk provides an overview of the Alewife project and its important milestones. It describes Alewife's mechanisms and discusses their performance on a 32-node Alewife Machine prototype. Host: Prof. Mark Crovella ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This is the first colloquium in our Spring series. For colloquium info, including directions, see http://cs-www.bu.edu/colloquium For more information contact Prof. Mark Crovella -------------------------------------------------------------------------------