A radiative heat transfer simulation on a SPARCStation farm

Abstract

At the Supercomputing Research Center the authors have built a compute farm consisting of 16 SPARCStation ELCs. The ELCs all support the Mether distributed shared memory, which has primitives to support efficient synchronization and use of the network and processors. The first parallel application they ran on the farm was a Monte Carlo radiative heat transfer simulation. The performance they achieved on the farm was within an order of magnitude of the performance they would expect to achieve on a 16-processor model of the C90 supercomputer available from Cray Research. With this application, they found that the use of the Mether distributed shared memory allowed them to run the same code on the Cray as they ran on the SPARCStations. >