Topics for Distinguished Visitors Program
(Jie Wu)





Parallel Processing: Past, Present, and Future 1

  Parallel computing is one of the most exciting technologies to achieve prominence since the invention of electronic computers. But the departures from the Von Neumann computational model create many questions and problems. What kind of applications have sufficient parallelism? What will be the nature of the processing elements, and how will they communicate with each other? What will the new computational model be? What will the software be like? This talk focuses on the total design problem involved in parallel processing. A brief history of parallel computing is presented first, followed by a list of major issues in the design of a parallel system. Three major design approaches are discussed: control (task) parallelism, data parallelism, and pipelining. Finally, we provide our own view of the future of parallel processing.


Fault-Tolerant Communication in Point-to-Point Networks

 
One of the challenges in fault-tolerant communication is to achieve certain objectives without excessive cost in collecting and maintaining fault information. We propose an approach that achieves optimal routing with limited amount of global fault information. This approach is illustrated by the concept of a safety level (vector) that can be applied to hypercube- and mesh-connected systems. In this approach each node is associated with a safety level, which is an approximate measure of the number and distribution of faulty nodes in the neighborhood. The safety level can be used to determine routing feasibility as well as to provide necessary information to facilitate optimal routing. This talk addresses related issues and possible future directions in this area.


Optimal Routing in Mesh-Connected Multicomputers: Challenges and Solutions

  Mesh-connected topology is one of the most thoroughly investigated network topologies for multicomputer systems. It is important due to its simple structure and its good performance in practice. We discuss several optimal routing problems which are important for system performance which is dependent on the end-to-end cost of communication mechanisms. We then focus on two optimal routing examples, one for one-to-one routing (also called unicasting), and the other for one-to-all routing (also called broadcasting). Applicability of these approaches and open directions of research in this area are also presented.




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