August 1996

International Conference on Parallel Processing

Since the PAPERS project and parallel processing using Linux PCs in general had become more popular, it made sense to offer a tutorial aimed at helping people build and use such systems.

On August 16, 1996, Prof. Hank Dietz presented the full-day tutorial "High-Performance Parallel Processing Using PCs and Linux" at the 25th International Conference on Parallel Processing, in Bloomingdale, IL. An HTML version of the slides is available for personal WWW viewing at http://yara.ecn.purdue.edu/~pplinux/ICPP96/Index.html. Accompanying the slides is a tar file containing support software for SMP and cluster parallel Linux systems (much of which also can be used to simulate parallelism on uniprocessor systems).

Of course, we also took this opportunity to bring and demonstrate both PAPERS and the new AFAPI library. For this purpose, we brought:

• A four cluster of 486DX33 machines to demonstrate TTL_PAPERS AFAPI, PVM, and MPI (PVM and MPI over Ethernet).
• A dual-processor Pentium 100 SMP system (shown in the photo above) to demonstrate the new SHMAPERS AFAPI, bb_threads, and use of System V shared memory.

Unfortunately, while we were out for lunch, there was apparently a nasty power failure to the room which killed one of the 486 system's power supplies... which limited our ability to run some of the demos. Oh well.

The next public demonstration of PAPERS at a conference was December 1996 at IEEE/ACM Supercomputing.

The only thing set in stone is our name.