El-Rewini H., Abd-El-Barr M. Advanced Computer Architecture and Parallel Processing

John Wiley & Sons, 2005. — 287 p.Single processor supercomputers have achieved great speeds and have been pushing hardware technology to the physical limit of chip manufacturing. But soon this trend will come to an end, because there are physical and architectural bounds, which limit the computational power that can be achieved with a single processor system. In this book, we study advanced computer architectures that utilize parallelism via multiple processing units. While parallel computing, in the form of internally linked processors, was the main form of parallelism, advances in computer networks has created a new type of parallelism in the form of networked autonomous computers. Instead of putting everything in a single box and tightly couple processors to memory, the Internet achieved a kind of parallelism by loosely connecting everything outside of the box. To get the most out of a computer system with internal or external parallelism, designers and software developers must understand the interaction between hardware and software parts of the system. This is the reason we wrote this book. We want the reader to understand the power and limitations of multiprocessor systems. Our goal is to apprise the reader of both the beneficial and challenging aspects of advanced architecture and parallelism. The material in this book is organized in 10 chapters, as follows.Introduction to Advanced Computer Architecture and Parallel Processing
Multiprocessors Interconnection Networks
Performance Analysis of Multiprocessor Architecture
Shared Memory Architecture
Message Passing Architecture
Abstract Models
Network Computing
Parallel Programming in the Parallel Virtual Machine
Message Passing Interface (MPI)
Scheduling and Task Allocation