文档介绍：puter Architecture
A Hardware / Software Approach
David Culler
University of California, Berkeley
Jaswinder Pal Singh
Princeton University
with Anoop Gupta
Stanford University
Morgan Kaufmann is pleased to present material from a preliminary draft of Parallel
Computer Architecture; the material is (c) Copyright 1997 Morgan Kaufmann Publishers. This
material may not be used or distributed for mercial purpose without the express
written consent of Morgan Kaufmann Publishers. Please note that this material is a draft of
ing publication, and as such neither Morgan Kaufmann nor the authors can be held
liable for changes or alterations in the final edition.
8/28/97 DRAFT: puter Architecture 1
2 DRAFT: puter Architecture 8/28/97
Although puting has a long and rich academic history, the close coupling -
Preface modity technology has fundamentally changed the discipline. The emphasis on radical architec-
tures and exotic technology has given way to quantitative analysis and careful engineering trade-
offs. Our goal in writing this book is to equip designers of the emerging class of multiprocessor
systems, from modestly parallel puters to massively parallel puters, with
an understanding of the fundamental architectural issues and the available techniques for
addressing design trade-offs. At the same time, we hope to provide designers of software systems
for these machines with an understanding of the likely directions of architectural evolution and
the forces that will determine the specific path that hardware designs will follow.
The most exciting recent development in puter architecture is the convergence of tra-
ditionally disparate approaches, namely shared-memory, message-passing, SIMD, and dataflow,
on mon machine structure. This is driven partly mon technological and economic
forces, and partly by a better understanding of parallel software. This convergence allows us to
focus on the overriding architectural issues a