The NYU Ultracomputer—designing a MIMD, shared-memory parallel machine (Extended Abstract)
Allan Gottlieb, Ralph Grishman, Clyde P. Kruskal, Kevin P. McAuliffe, Larry Rudolph, Marc Snir · ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News · 1982
We present the design for the NYU Ultracomputer, a shared-memory MIMD parallel machine composed of thousands of autonomous processing elements. This machine uses an enhanced message switching network with the geometry of an Omega-network to approximate the ideal behavior of Schwartz's paracomputer model of computation and to implement efficiently the important fetch-and-add synchronization primitive. We outline the hardware that would be required to build a 4096 processor system using 1990's technology. We also discuss system software issues, and present analytic studies of the network performance. Finally, we include a sample of our effort to implement and simulate parallel variants of important scientific programs.