Radiative Heat Transfer Simulation on a SPARCStation Farm

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Abstract
At the Supcrcomputing Research Center we have built a computing farm consisting of 16 SPARCStation. ELCs. The ELCs all support the Mother distributed shared memory, which has primitives to support efficient synchronization and use of the network and processors. Mother docs not support the traditional consistency semantics provided by, for example, Ivy or Mach external pagers.The first parallel application we ran on the farm was a Monte Carlo radiative heat transfer simulation. The performance we achieved on the farm was within an order of magnitude of the performance we would expect to achieve on a 16‐processor model of the C90 supercomputer available from Cray Research.With this application we found that the use of the Mother distributed shared memory allowed us to run the same code on the Cray as we ran on the SPARCStatlons, and we did not require the complex cache‐coherent memory semantics provided by, say, Ivy or Mach to run this application effectively.

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