Title: A dynamic processor management strategy on the reconfigurable meshes

Authors: Kyung-Hee Seo, Sung-Chun Kim

Addresses: School of Computer Science, Sungshin Women's University, 249-1, DongSun-Dong, SungBuk-Gu, Seoul, 136-742, Korea. ' Computer Science Department, Sogang University, SinSu-Dong 1, Mapo_Gu, Seoul, 121-742, Korea

Abstract: A reconfigurable mesh consists of a mesh connected topology augmented by a dynamically reconfigurable bus system. The reconfigurable mesh combines two attractive features of massively parallel system, namely constant diameter and the flexibility of the bus system. Efficient utilisation of processing resources in a large, multi user parallel system depends on the reliable processor management scheme. This paper presents a dynamic and reliable processor allocation strategy to increase the performance of mesh connected parallel systems with faulty processors. The basic idea is to reconfigure a faulty mesh system into a maximum convex system using the fault free upper or lower boundary nodes to compensate for the nonboundary faulty nodes. To utilise the nonrectangular shaped system parts, our strategy tries to allocate L shaped submeshes instead of signalling the allocation failure. Extensive simulations show that the strategy performs more efficiently than other strategies in terms of the completion time, the job response time and the system utilisation.

Keywords: dynamic processor management; reconfigurable meshes; massively parallel systems; parallel computing; high performance computing; networking; mesh performance; simulation; processor allocation; faulty processors.

DOI: 10.1504/IJHPCN.2005.007867

International Journal of High Performance Computing and Networking, 2005 Vol.3 No.1, pp.54 - 61

Published online: 28 Sep 2005 *

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