RE: A Hardware Question

["Eric Verhulst \(OLS\)" <eric.verhulst@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

You're in trouble. This is a major issue with most current CPU's using all
kind of micro-parallelism tricks (pripelining, etc.) to get a higher peak
performance and hence you have big contexts and big caches.

My best bet is the TigerSharc DSP from Analog Devices. But be aware, this is
not for the casual programmer and you'll need a decent OS with it. I think
you could use 3L's Parallel C (processes and channels). Ask Transtech.


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-----Original Message-----
From: owner-occam-com@xxxxxxxxxx [mailto:owner-occam-com@xxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Richard Loosemore
Sent: Tuesday, November 15, 2005 5:29 PM
To: Occam Family
Subject: A Hardware Question

Okay folks, I have a question about buying parallel hardware.

If I were wanting to buy hardware today, and I wanted fine-grained
(-ish) parallelism, what would I do?  (Oh, btw I am asking you folks because
I really would want to run occam on it).

My problem is that I don't think that an OTS cluster of workstations linked
by fast ethernet would be good enough, as you might able to see from the
following specs:

Processes that were numerous (typically 1,000 to 10,000) but fairly compact
(say a thousand bytes of code each, perhaps more).

Communications that are small packet-size, with frequent exchanges (does me
no good to save 'em up and send a book-sized transfer, I need lots of little
packets going back and forth).

Not much locality, so any one of my processes can want to talk to any other.

I am focussed on high-level issues these days, so I am out of touch with the
hardware that is available.  Does anyone know if there is stuff out there
that would be appropriate?

I should tell you that my preference is to use Macintosh hardware, for
programming and interface reasons, but I realise that that might keep me
separated from occam for a long, long time.... :-(

Any thoughts, suggestions or hoots of laughter would be accepted graciously.

Richard Loosemore.