Experiences with networked parallel computing

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Abstract
The performance and proliferation of workstations continues to increase at a rapid rate. However, the practical utilization of workstation networks for parallel computing is still in its infancy. This is due to the relative immaturity of programming tools, low bandwidth networks such as Ethernet, and high message latencies. However, programming tools are becoming more mature and network bandwidths are increasing rapidly. Hence, networks of commodity workstations may prove to be practical for certain classes of parallel applications.This paper describes our experiences with two applications parallelized on a network of Sun workstations. The first application is from Shell's petroleum engineering department. This program quantitatively derives rock and porefill composition from well‐log data, using a compute‐intensive iterative optimization procedure. The second application is time filtering, which is a fundamental operation performed on seismic traces.Through our experiments we identify the limits of networked parallel computing based on the current state of network technology. We also provide a discussion on the possible impact of future high speed networks on networked parallel computing.

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