🚀 go-pugleaf

                         UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER
                       Computer Science Department

                              S E M I N A R


WHEN:     November 9, 1992
          11:00 A.M.

SPEAKER:  MICHAEL STUMM
          University of Toronto


             "Experiences with the Hector Multiprocessor"

Hector is a shared-memory multiprocessor based on a hierarchy of unidirectional
slotted rings.  The architecture was designed to be both size scalable and
generation scalable, yet remain simple.  Hector is size scalable because the
throughput scales with the size of the system, and because the cost of the
system is directly proportional to the size of the system.  It is generation
scalable in that it can support the fast clock rates of future processor
generations, which is a direct result of having only point-to-point connections
and having simplicity be the primary principle in our design.  At the University
of Toronto, we have implemented a prototype with 32 processors to test the key
concepts of the architecture.  We have implemented an operating system for it,
and run a variety of applications on it.

In the talk, we describe our experiences with the Hector project.  We examine
critically both the Hector architecture and the decisions made while building a
prototype machine, with respect to the main objectives of simplicity and
scalability.  We discuss software implications, based on the development of an
operating system and application code, and we present performance results
obtained from experiments run on the prototype.  We conclude that the Hector
system demonstrates that a scalable shared-memory multiprocessor need not be
more complex than a distributed-memory multicomputer, yet it can provide for
lower latency communication, and, therefore, run a larger class of applications.



Refreshments will be served at 10:45 A.M. in Room 209, Computer Studies Building