Stencil Methods on Distributed High Performance Computers

We describe a distributed computational infrastructure for applying kernel operators on arbitrary images. Our primary use for this is the processing of GMS-5 satellite imagery, although there are many possible applications in the areas of general image processing, cellular automata, computational physics and the direct solving of partial differential equations, among others. We discuss the issues involved in implementing our framework using the data parallel and message passing paradigms, and provide and discuss performance data for our message passing implementation using MPI/MPICH. In this work we also perform initial investigations into the various distributed I/O issues involved in performing such tasks on a network of workstations with RAID and ATM technology, and provide and discuss results. Keywords: Parallel and distributed computing, image processing, distributed I/O, ATM, RAID. 1 Introduction This document describes a distrubuted computational infrastructure for applying a ..