Assigning Processes to Processors in a Parallel Architecture

Researchers: Richard Stevens---Visiting Scholar, Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC
Advisor:Edward A. Lee
Sponsor:
To acquire state-of-the-art hardware at reduced cost, the U.S. Navy is committed to buying Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) computer hardware. In this rapidly changing technological world, today's hardware will be obsolete tomorrow. Parallel machines tend to have architecture specific languages, requiring an expensive and time-consuming manual rewrite of application software as new technology and new machines become available.

The Processing Graph Method (PGM), developed at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington, DC, is an architecture independent method for specifying application software for parallel architectures. The on-going PGM Tool (PGMT) project at NRL will devolop a toolset for rapid, low-cost production of PGM "compilers" for parallel architectures.

A major part of the PGMT effort will be the assignment of processes to processors. This will explore various assignment methods for Dynamic Data Flow (DDF) graphs, where the flow of data between processing nodes is data dependent and thus not predictable at compile time. These assignment methods will be evaluated for there effectiveness in providing high throughput with low memory requirements and low latency.

Richard Stevens is an employee of the U.S. Government whose contributions to this work fall within the scope of 17 U.S.C. A7 105

Last updated 04/29/97. Send comments to www@ptolemy.eecs.berkeley.edu.