Summary
The growth of processing power and network bandwidth has drastically outpaced
the growth of memory bandwidth and I/O bus bandwidth available in commodity
clusters (often referred to as Beowulf Clusters). Current research
into novel processing architectures, such as reconfigurable computing,
promise a several fold increase in processing power. Unfortunately,
these technologies place an even heavier burden on the commodity memory
system and the commodity I/O bus in a cluster.
This project is investigating a novel architecture that integrates reconfigurable
computing with the network interface in a Beowulf Cluster. We believe
the result is greater than the sum of its parts; the two technologies
complement
one another masking some of the other's deficiencies.
Performance models indicate that this architecture improves performance
significantly for three distinct types of applications. These models
are verified with a prototype system and extended to consider the performance
potential of a next generation system.
The original description is here.
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Support
We gratefully acknowledge the support of NSF and NASA who made
this project possible.
- This material is based upon work supported by the National Science
Foundation under Grant No. 9985986.
- NASA Code 935 and previous branches have supported various students
through the life of this project.
