NPAC Technical Report SCCS-421
An Analysis of Distributed Computing Software and Hardware for Applications in Computational Physics
P.D. Coddington
July 1993
Published in
Proc. of the Second Int. Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing
(HPDC-2), Spokane, WA (July 1993).
© Copyright IEEE Computer Society.
Abstract
We have implemented a set of computational physics codes on a network
of IBM RS/6000 workstations used as a distributed parallel computer.
We compare the performance of the codes on this network, using both
standard Ethernet connections and a fast prototype switch,
and also on the nCUBE/2, a MIMD parallel computer.
The algorithms used range from simple, local, and regular, to complex,
non-local, and irregular.
We describe our experiences with the hardware, software and parallel
languages used, and discuss ideas for making distributed
parallel computing on workstation networks more easily usable for
computational physicists.
PostScript version
(gzip compressed)
PDF version