A Radiative Heat Transfer Simulation on a SPARCStation Farm

At the Supercomputing Research Center we have built a compute farm consisting of 16 SPARCStation ELCs. The ELCs all support the Mether distributed shared memoryy13], which has primitives to support eecient synchronization and use of the network and processorss14]. Mether does not support the traditional consistency semantics provided by, e.g., Ivyy12] or Mach external pagerss9]. The rst parallel application we ran on the farm was a Monte Carlo radiative heat transfer simulationn2]. The performance we achieved on the farm was within an order of magnitude of the performance we would expect to achieve on a 16-processor model of the C90 supercomputer available from Cray Research. With this application, we found that the use of the Mether Distributed Shared Memory allowed us to run the same code on the Cray as we ran on the SPARC-Stations, and we did not require the complex cache-coherent memory semantics provided by, e.g., Ivy or Mach to run this application eeectively.