Tailoring a Self-Distributing Architecture to a Cluster Computer Environment

This paper analyzes the consequences of existing network structure for the design of a protocol for a radical COMA (Cache Only Memory Architecture). Parallel Computing today faces two significant challenges: the difficulty of programming and the need to leverage existing "off-the-shelf " hardware. The difficulty of programming parallel computers can be split into two problems: distributing the data, and distributing the computation. Parallelizing compilers address both problems, but have limited application outside the domain of loopintensive "scientific" code. Conventional COMAs provide an adaptive, self-distributing solution to data distribution, but do not address computation distribution. Our proposal leverages parallelizing compilers, and then extends COMA to provide adaptive self-distribution of both data and computation. The radical COMA protocols can be implemented in hardware, software, or a combination of both. When, however, the implementation is constrained to operate in..