Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!umnd-cs!umn-cs!herndon From: herndon@umn-cs.UUCP Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: chewing up mips with graphics Message-ID: <1658@umn-cs.UUCP> Date: Tue, 16-Jun-87 16:05:39 EDT Article-I.D.: umn-cs.1658 Posted: Tue Jun 16 16:05:39 1987 Date-Received: Thu, 18-Jun-87 04:06:16 EDT References: <8270@amdahl.amdahl.com> <359@rocky2.UUCP> <2120@dg_rtp.UUCP> Organization: University of Minnesota, Minneapolis Lines: 34 Summary: Huh? In article <2120@dg_rtp.UUCP>, wood@dg_rtp.UUCP (Tom Wood) writes: > ... What architectural features help in dealing with > these various applications (graphics, simulation, object oriented AI, > CAD)? > ... If not, it seems you'ld have to try > to build a "Cray": one fast monolithic processor. Cray has been selling multiprocessor systems for a few years now. Even the machines Seymour Cray designed while at CDC were multiprocessors (central processor and lots of little peripheral processors) and have come in dual central processor models for some time. > > So how many fast CPUs can these applications benefit from? My guess is > that most would have a hard time using more than 1, and that some may > be able to use 2 or so. > Tom Wood (919) 248-6067 Many applications would benefit significantly from parallelism. I'm informed that ray-tracing graphics is trivially parallelizable to many many machines. Many types of simulation are also parallelizable (weather prediction, thermal simulations, flow simulation, ...). Most physical simulations can be mapped onto a planar 3D mesh for significant speed gain. Many applications are not easily serialized, but a surprising number are parallelizable. Rethinking algorithms for massive parallelism often yields surprinsing speedups. See the December 1986 CACM article on the connection machine for some interesting parallel algorithms. -- Robert Herndon Dept. of Computer Science, ...!ihnp4!umn-cs!herndon Univ. of Minnesota, herndon@umn-cs.ARPA 136 Lind Hall, 207 Church St. SE herndon.umn-cs@csnet-relay.ARPA Minneapolis, MN 55455