Transputer data-flow solution for systems of linear equations
Tim Hopkins, Peter H. Welch · Concurrency Practice and Experience · 1996
The authors present data-flow solutions on a pipeline of transputers for banded and dense systems of linear equations using Gauss elimination and the Gauss-Jordan method, respectively. These implementations, written in occam, are especially effective when there is a continuous supply of right-hand sides to be solved with the same coefficient matrix. Attention is paid to both load balancing and resource handling within the processor elements of the pipeline. When solving multiple right-hand sides, floating-point efficiency levels on 32-processor implementations range from 110% (for dense systems) down to 90% (for banded systems), where 100% represents the peak performance attainable from a single transputer applied to the same problem (effectively back-to-back floating-point operations on data in external memory). Some conclusions are drawn on efficiency issues arising from state-of-the-art massively parallel supercomputers.