Daria R. Dooling

Formal method for scheduling, routing and communication protocol

The PRAM model has been shown to be an optimal design for emulating both loose and tightly coupled multiprocessors for unit time operations. When virtual processors are required, multiplexing work to available processors is employed. This introduces a form of latency incurred by operating system overhead. Further complications arise when bandwidth creates bottlenecking of work units. G.E. Blelloch (1989) showed how to add parallel prefix operations (scans) to an extended PRAM model which uses unit step, not time operations. This paper shows how the Psi( psi ) calculus can be used to group work units, i.e. pipelining the work units, so that multiplexing is not required. The authors instead pipeline work units to processors and show how the number of processors need not be equivalent to the number of data components. Partitioning array data structures and pipelining groups of partitions to processors can minimize latency and bottlenecking on distributed message passing multiprocessing architectures.<<ETX>>

Integrated Manufacturing and Development (IMaD)

This article describes an IBM-developed parallel software methodology called Integrated Manufacturing and Development (IMaD). IMaD is a super-scalable AIX application written in the C programming language and makes use of the Message Passing Interface (MPI). It is built specifically to support Product Engineering (PE) for full-scale integrated circuits (IC), like microprocessors, and encompasses failure, yield, and reliability design and analysis. Because an IC is constructed of smaller building-block circuits, many aspects of its behavior are learned from a local analysis of some subset of the IC. However, there are global aspects of an IC-such as its power-grid electrical distribution that require a full-scale formulation, solution, evaluation, and visualization. This sets the stage for some very large problems that demand enormous computational and memory resources. In answer to these demands, IMaD provides a parallel processing solution that incorporates novel methods of both topographic partitioning of the IC and of solving the global electrical simulation equations.