Assignment 1: EE686 Advanced Computer Architecture Design

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  1. Which one of the following five statements is not an advantage of MIMD over SIMD?
    Variable time operation sequences take the max of the sums time, not the sum of the maxs
    Commodity microprocessors are more easily used to build a MIMD system
    There is less communication overhead sending data between PEs
    MIMD execution does not require distribution of a clock to all PEs
    Both functional and data parallelism can be supported
  2. How does message-passing hardware implement DSM in software? Briefly describe what happens when a shared variable is read and what happens when it is subsequently written. (Hint: talk about page table actions.)
  3. Suppose that a network connects pairs of nodes as shown below. Which links determine the bisection bandwidth? (Denote links as X-Y for the link between X and Y.) Assuming that each link is a cable between 100Mb/s Ethernet interfaces, what is the bisection bandwidth?


  4. One of the little details we discussed in class was the use of "Jumbo" somethings for 1Gb/s Ethernet. Briefly explain what was "Jumbo," why this was considered a good thing, and what impact the use of these things has on message latency.
  5. Briefly explain how fetch-and-add works in the NYU Ultracomputer... what is the architectural problem this type of operation is trying to solve?
  6. Briefly explain the concept of ownership as it applies to shared memory systems. In very general terms, how does this concept improve efficiency?
  7. Which one of the following statements is false?
    A major difference between a grid, farm, and cluster is the properties of the networks that connect their nodes
    What runs well on a cluster usually will run well on a grid
    All nodes within a farm usually have similar properties
    Nodes in a grid may be very heterogeneous
    A Beowulf is a type of cluster
  8. Multi-core processor chips are becoming common; how do programs running on different cores talk to each other? (Describe the basic model used, whatever that is: RMAs, message-passing, shared memory, etc.)
  9. What is a barrier synchronization? What does it have to do with running SIMD code on MIMD hardware?
  10. Name one commercially-marketed MIMD that was programmed as a shared-memory system and one programmed as a message-passing system (be sure to indicate which is which).

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EE686 Advanced Computer Architecture Design.