E-kernel on the IBM Victor V256 multiprocessor: An experimental platform for parallel systems
Shea, Dennis G · Scholarly Commons (University of Pennsylvania) · 1991
This thesis presents the design of an experimental platform for parallel systems--E-kernel on the Victor V256 parallel system. E-kernel is an embedding kernel developed for the support of program mapping and network reconfiguration. E-kernel supports two levels of embedding: in the first level, the embedding of a network topology onto Victor's 2-d mesh network, and in the second level, the embedding of a task graph onto the system network. The first level corresponds to network reconfiguration (through software) and the second level to program mapping (placement of processes to processors through software). Victor is a partitionable, message passing, experimental parallel system that has been designed and developed in the modular microsystems group of the parallel systems department at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in part to support this research. Key architectural features incorporated into Victor, such as the need for partitioning and monitoring, have been driven by this research, and solutions in part are a result of it. The development of E-kernel translates some of the many theoretical results in graph embeddings into practical tools for program mapping and network reconfiguration in a parallel system. With hardware and software system supports like these, users are able to design their programs according to the most natural task graph topologies, with the system attempting the communication optimization automatically on its network. Victor V256, together with E-kernel, provides a rich experimentation environment for parallel systems.