On the performance of loosely coupled multiprocessors

Abstract

A Processing Element (PE) essentially consists of a processor and a memory module. A loosely coupled multiprocessor is comprised of a set of such PEs interconnected through an Interconnection Network (IN).The designof the IN is crucial to an efficient communicationbeween the PEs.This paper presents approximate evaluations of two loosely coupled architectures, each having three types of INs, namely: shared bus, crossbar anda class of Multi stage Interconnection Networks (MINS) called Omega network. Probability of Acceptance (PA) of a message is considered as a measure of the performance.For a high rate of internal requests, it is shown that an Omega network performs close to a crossbar while reducing the the cost of interconnection to a large extent.