Designing Communication Strategies for Heterogeneous Parallel Systems

This paper investigates communication strategies for interconnecting heterogeneous parallel systems. As the speed of processors and parallel systems keep on increasing over the years, electronic interconnections like HIPPI and FDDI are reaching their limit to provide heterogeneous parallel computing environment. This paper explores the suitability of the emerging passive star-coupled optical interconnection using wavelength division multiplexing as the system interconnect to provide high bandwidth (Gbits/sec) communication demanded by heterogeneous systems. Several different communication strategies (combinations of communication topologies and protocols) over Wavelength Division Multiplexed (WDM) communication media like optic fiber are investigated under a representative master-slave computational model. The interplay between system speed, network speed, task granularity, and degree of parallelism is studied using both analytical modeling and simulations. It is shown that a hierarchi..