Early parallelism with a loosely coupled array of processors: The ICAP experiment
Section snippets
The LCAP environment
Initial interest in parallel computing is spurred in general by a number of factors differing situation to situation. For one of us (Clementi) parallel computing was first encountered at the IBM Research laboratory, San Jose, California, in the early sixties, by making an assessment on the main features of an experimental parallel computer commissioned by the USA government to a research centre in Menlo Park, California, and designed particularly for solving fluid dynamics computations. The
LCAP software
As ICAP evolved, there were three significantly different configurations: (1) host to channel attached processors, as shown in Fig. 1, (2) host to channel attached processors interconnected with shared bulk memories and fast-bus, as shown in Fig. 2, and (3) channel coupled-shared memory multiprocessors, as shown in Fig. 3. We have developed two approaches to the way the parallel processor configurations communicate. Configuration (1) was clearly a `master/slave' topology, therefore the system
LCAP applications
The first computational applications on ICAP were in computational chemistry, one of the main interest of the Kingston department, and a most reasonable application choice for the early ICAP, since at the time without shared memory and fast bus. There were two distinct tasks to be accomplished, first to port a code from scalar to parallel measuring also performance and second to use the parallel code in a scientific application. Note that the two tasks were often reported in the same
Conclusions
It appears that there are strong indications pointing out that notable progress in simulations of `complex matter' can be made mainly by exploring more and more the `mixed systems' methodology. The present lack of interdisciplinary knowledge is the main cultural drawback we face. In an attempt to break this mental bondage, we have attempted to collect different modern methods and techniques into a unified computational frame, explained in the MOTECC-91 [73] and the METECC-94 [74] volumes and
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