Latest revision as of 20:56, 28 August 2007

Peer-reviewed Assignment 1

Section 1.1.1, first half: Scientific/engineering application trends
- What characterizes present-day applications?
- How much memory, processor time, etc.?
- How high is the speedup?

Section 1.1.1, second half: Commercial application trends
- What characterizes present-day applications?
- How much memory, processor time, etc.?
- How high is the speedup?

Section 1.1.3: Architectural trends
- How have architectures changed in the past 10 years?
- Update Figs. 1.8 and 1.9 with new points, for 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, and 2007.

Section 1.1.4: Supercomputers
- Compare current supercomputers with those of 10 yrs. ago.
- Update Figures 1.10 to 1.12 with new data points. For 1.12, consult top500.org.

Sections 1.2.1 and 1.2.4: Communication architecture
- Trends in last 10 years.
- How has data parallelism found its way into shared-memory and message-passing machines? An early example would be MMX.
- Would you change the number of layers in Fig. 1.13?

Section 1.2.2: Shared address space
- Any changes in the organization of address spaces in the last 10 years?
- Are the interconnection structures different in new computers now than they were 10 years ago?
- What is the size and capacity of current SMPs?
- How have supercomputers evolved since the Cray T3E?

Section 1.2.3: Message passing
- Are blade servers an extension of message passing?
- How have blade architectures evolved over the past 10 years?

Section 1.2.5: Trends in vector processing and array processing.
- New machines have recently been announced. Why will this be an important architectural dimension in the coming years?

Section 1.2.6
- New developments in dataflow and systolic architectures, if any.
- Or if not, why are these styles not evolving with time?

Sections 1.3.1 and 1.3.2: Communication and programming model
- How have reordering strategies evolved to accommodate larger multicomputers?
- Have new kinds of synchronization operations been developed?
- I doubt that other topics covered in these sections have changed much, but do check.

Sections 1.3.3 and 1.3.4: Most changes here are probably related to performance metrics.
- Cite other models for measuring artifacts such as data-transfer time, overhead, occupancy, and communication cost. Focus on the models that are most useful in practice.

@@ Line 54: / Line 54: @@
 * Sections 1.3.3 and 1.3.4:  Most changes here are probably related to performance metrics.
-** Cite other models for measuring artifacts such as data-transfer time, overhead, occupancy, and communication cost.
+** Cite other models for measuring artifacts such as data-transfer time, overhead, occupancy, and communication cost. Focus on the models that are most useful in practice.
-** Focus on the models that are most useful in practice.