Software and Hardware Support for Workstation-based Supercomputing

The proliferation of high performance workstations and the emergence of high speed networks have attracted a lot of interest in workstationbased supercomputing. We project that workstationbased environments with supercomputing capabilities will be available in the not-so-distant future. However a number of hardware and software issues have to be resolved before the full potential of these workstation-based supercomputing environments can be exploited. The presented research has two main objectives: (1) to investigate the limitations of communications techniques used in current workstation-based systems and to identify a set of requirements that must be satisfied to achieve workstation-based supercomputing; (2) to use these requirements to develop software and hardware support that enables workstation-based supercomputing. The performance of two applications, the LU factorization of dense matrices and the calculation of FFT, on two platforms, the iPSC/860 supercomputer and on a cluster ..