Concepts for a Distributed Implementation

Abstract

In order to point out substantial design issues for the parallel FCP machine, this section introduces the underlying abstract machine architecture in terms of a generic model. The resulting abstract machine specification provides a general framework within which the various techniques used for exploiting and controlling parallelism are discussed in the sections 4.2 to 4.9. In fact, this specification already reflects the basic features of the parallel machine, as far as they concern the distributed reduction algorithm and dynamic work load balancing. Important design issues refer to the applied parallelization concept, the resulting scalability features, communication and synchronization, and distributed data representation. How to implement the abstract architecture on a real target architecture, with respect to an implementation on Transputer networks, will be considered in Chapter 5.