language: en

SUPRENUM: Perspectives and Performance

Oliver A. McBryan
Dept. of Computer Science University of Colorado
Boulder, CO 80309.
Email: mcbryan@cs.colorado.edu

Abstract We describe our impressions of the SUPRENUM project and of its primary supercomputer result, the Suprenum-1 prototype. We comment on the significance of the architecture, its role among contemporary systems and its relevance to current systems. We similarly discuss the SUPRENUM software and its impact on distributed systems. Finally we discuss the successes and failures observed throughout this exciting project and relate these to the organizational decisions on which SUPRENUM was based. As an illustration of Suprenum-1 capabilities, we describe the implementation of a fluid dynamical benchmark on the 256 node Suprenum-1 parallel computer. The benchmark, the Shallow Water Equations, is frequently used as a model for both oceanographic and atmospheric circulation. We describe the steps involved in implementing the algorithm on the Suprenum-1 and we provide details of performance obtained. For such regular grid-based algorithms the system delivers a very impressive fraction (25%) of its theoretical peak rate of 5 Gflops.

Keywords: SUPRENUM, MPP, MIMD, parallel, supercomputer, performance, atmospheric, shallow water, architecture, software, message passing.

[* Research supported in part by NSF Grand Challenges Applications Group grant ASC-9217394 and by NASA HPCC Group Grant NAG5-2218. To appear in Parallel Computing, October 1994.]