SMP Parallelism: Current Achievements, Future Challenges

by Stef Salvini (The Numerical Algorithms Group Ltd (NAG))

Wednesday 3 Jul 2002, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Zurich

500/1-001 - Main Auditorium (CERN)

SMP (symmetric Multi-Processors) hardware technologies are very popular with vendors and end-users alike for a number of reasons. However, true shared memory parallelism has experienced somewhat slower take up amongst the scientific-programming community. NAG has been at the forefront of SMP technology for a number of years, and the NAG SMP Library has shown the potential of SMP systems. At the very high end, SMP hardware technologies are used as building blocks of modern supercomputers, which truly consist of clusters of SMP systems, for which no dedicated model of parallelism yet exists. The aim of this talk is to introduce SMP systems and their potential. Results from our work at NAG will also be introduced to show how SMP parallelism, based on a shared memory paradigm, can be used to very good effect and can produce high performance, scalable software. The talk also aims to discuss some aspects of the apparent slow take up of shared memory parallelism and the potential competition from PC (i.e. Intel)-based cluster technology. The talk then aims to explore the potential of SMP technology within 'hybrid parallelism', i.e. mixed distributed and shared memory modes, illustrating the point with some preliminary work carried out by the author and others. Finally, a number of potential future challenges to numerical analysts will be discussed. The talk is aimed at all who are interested in SMP technologies for numerical computing, irrespective of any previous experience in the field. The talk aims to stimulate discussion, by presenting some ideas, backing these with data, not to stifle it in an ocean of detail! BIO: Dr Stefano Salvini is the Group Leader of the High Performance Computing Group of the Numerical Libraries Division of NAG Ltd.