From: cap@ifi.unizh.ch (Clemens Cap)
Subject: Re: Parallel Programming Platform
Organization: University of Zurich, Department of Computer Science
Date: Mon, 14 Sep 92 13:59:36 GMT

In article <1992Sep11.121758.16815@hubcap.clemson.edu> kaminsky-david@CS.YALE.EDU (David Kaminsky) writes:
>I'd just like to note (as is noted in Cap's paper) that the
>performance data for "Linda" given in the <Parform> paper are actually
>data for POSYBL (a public domain version of Linda).
>
>As a result, these times almost certainly do not reflect the
>performance achievable with optimized implementations of Linda like those
>developed by Yale and SCA.

Thank you very much for your remarks. We will try to improve this. In fact
we are very interested in comparisons of message passing paradigms with
shared memory and tuple space concepts. Upto now our experiments indicate
advantages with message passing. 

One of the problems associated with commercial Linda and even the reason
for the development of POSYBL is the cost. Since POSYBL was
the only version of LINDA which was available to us timely and within
the limits of our funding, our measurements were made with POSYBL.

We are presently trying to remedy this problem, looking for possibilities
to obtain better versions of LINDA. (Who can help out?)  In the mean
time we are glad for any possibility to have our codes run on better
LINDA systems than ours.

>	Also in the paper:
>
>"The bottleneck of LINDA in a distributed environment
>is the concept of tuple space, especially the necessary
>scanning operations to find tuples of certain format".
>
>	Much of the Linda tuple matching is done at compile
>time (see Nick Carriero's Thesis, Yale University).  "Scanning"
>is not necessary.  In addition, modern network Linda systems
>distribute tuple space eliminating the bottleneck.
>

We do realize the efforts made in compile time analysis of tuple
matching. However we feel that this option can only be exploited
in some special applications or code specifically prepared for this
analysis by the programmer. Publications on LINDA usually come up with such
examples. If the number of machines participating in the computation is
known only at runtime and if a suitable parallelization technique is used,
many matchings can only be made at runtime.

Distributing tuple space may of course help eliminating the bottleneck
to some extent. On the other hand we need mechanisms searching
those distributed tuple spaces and holding them consistent. This produces
further network traffic and slows down the computation again.
This especially becomes a problem when dealing with some 25 and more
processors. We have not found network-LINDA measurements about such numbers of
processors in the literature and as outlined, have not been able to
make studies ourselves. However the Parform has been evaluated in
systems upto 40 and more processors. Special techniques of the Parform
are developed to ensure that in such systems Ethernet congestion still
remains acceptable. We do not feel that there is still bandwidth on the net
for protocols distributing tuple space.

In parallel computing in distributed workstation environments the main
bottleneck is communication bandwidth. Therefore systems which only
communicate those data items which must be communicated should be
superior to systems which have additional administrative overhead.
Of course many organizational aspects only become clear at runtime and
cannot be dealt with by compile time analyses (like compile time
tuple matching in LINDA). In tuple space systems this may produce
considerable overhead due to tuple space operations. Message passing
systems have their problems too, but they do not have this problem since
runtime organizational information can be structured much more efficiently
than in tuple space systems.

It is the main goal of the Parform to reduce this communication
overhead to obtain maximal speedup. The fact that our speedup curve
almost perfectly matches the speedup curve of a transputer multiprocessor
system proves, that The Parform indeed gets the performance of a
tightly coupled multiprocessor out of a distributed workstation
environment. In our present prototypic version we even could optimize
a number of things. 

We soon will make measurements to further improve the load balancing
mechanisms of the Parform and we will study scalability upto 100
workstations. We hope to have better versions of LINDA available then
for a better comparison. Until then we share the difficulties and problems of
the academic users and creators of POSYBL in obtaining commercial versions of
LINDA.

Clemens.

-- 
* Dr. Clemens H. CAP                        cap@ifi.unizh.ch (email)   
* Ass. Professor for Formal Methods in CS   +(1) 257-4326    (office)
* Dept. of Computer Science                 +(1) 322 02 19   (home)
* University of Zurich                      +(1) 363 00 35   (fax) 
* Winterthurerstr. 190                      CH-8057 Zurich, Switzerland        
* Motto: "Please do not read the last line of this signature".
   

-- 
* Dr. Clemens H. CAP                        cap@ifi.unizh.ch (email)   
* Ass. Professor for Formal Methods in CS   +(1) 257-4326    (office)
* Dept. of Computer Science                 +(1) 322 02 19   (home)
* University of Zurich                      +(1) 363 00 35   (fax) 

Newsgroups: comp.parallel