[Beowulf] Broadcast - not for HPC - or is it?

Matt Hurd matthurd at acm.org
Mon Oct 4 23:34:07 PDT 2010


Kevin,
>> Any ideas on the list about use of low latency broadcast for specific
>> applications in HPC?  Are there codes that would benefit?
>>
>
> Maybe they're doing a Monte Carlo forecast based on real-time market
> data; broadcasting the data to 1000+ processes where each process is
> using a different random seed to generate independent points in
> phase-space. Of course they would then have to send the updated
> phase-space somewhere in order to update their likelihoods and issue a
> reaction. I suppose if communication was the primary bottleneck,
> doubling of the performance would be an upper limit.

Thanks, that makes sense.  I guess what you're saying is a special
case of a broadcast oriented MAP then local refinement followed by
REDUCE.

Can't think of anything much in that problem space else myself.
Thought maybe a distributed shared memory (DSM) might make sense but
I'm not clever enough to know about that. As opposed to SIMD and MIMD,
not sure MISD (==broadcast?) is really a valid thing which low latency
broadcast could help with.  Is MISD a useful thing in the 21st
century?  Not sure it is and shaving such small amounts of nanos at
extra cost doesn't quite seem to fit a beowult style budget anyhow.
Just for HFTs and financial exchanges I guess...

Regards,

--Matt.

>
> -Kevin
>
>
>> _________________
>> www.zeptonics.com
>> _______________________________________________
>> Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf at beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing
>> To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Kevin Van Workum, PhD
> Sabalcore Computing Inc.
> Run your code on 500 processors.
> Sign up for a free trial account.
> www.sabalcore.com
> 877-492-8027 ext. 11
>



More information about the Beowulf mailing list