Analysis of World Experience in Creating Parallel Computing Systems Designed to Effectively Solve DIS-tasks
Andrey Molyakov · Journal of Electrical and Electronic Engineering · 2019
Author describes world experience in creating parallel computing systems by example Cray XE6 and network chip Gemini, designed to effectively solve Data intensive tasks (DIS-tasks). Most often, in modern supercomputers (SC), architecture options with shared (shared) memory are used to provide effective solutions to problems of high capacitive complexity, including those that contain mostly irregular work with memory. It is possible to provide support for a programming model with shared (shared) memory in various ways using hardware, as well as using virtualization software. Different options for implementing a shared memory programming model may vary in functionality and timing of memory accesses. The problem of the “memory wall” is that if arithmetic-logical operations take several processor cycles, then operations directly with the memory take several hundred cycles. If the memory is formed from the memories of computing nodes connected by a communication network, then the execution time of such a call includes the time of operation with the network to transfer addresses and data. This already increases the memory access time to several thousand cycles. The problem is that such delays in accessing data cause idle functional units of the processor - they cannot perform arithmetic and logical operations on data, because they simply do not exist due to the large delays in performing operations with memory.