Thesis (M.E.)--University of Florida, 2002. / Title from title page of source document. Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Florida, 2002. / Title from title page of source document. Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.E.)--University of Florida, 2002. / Title from title page of source document. Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references.

This thesis is concerned with architecture for long term general purpose computers. The work is based on current trends in machine architecture and technology. Projections from these generated "Architectural Soups". An Architectural Soup has the potential to emulate many different machine architectures. The characteristics of this class of machine are, three dimensional, simple cells and a simple communications topology, which can be reconfigured at a very low level. This thesis aims to show potential usefulness and viability of machines with such capability. Methods of programming are considered, and important design issues are investigated. A specific implementation architecture is described and illustrated through simulation. An assessment is made of the architecture and of the simulator used. In addition, the implementation architecture is used as the basis for a VLSI design, which shows the simplicity of a Soup cell, and provides estimates of the possible number of cells in future machines.

No description available.

A programming model which allows users to program with high productivity and which produces high performance executions has been a goal for decades. This dissertation makes progress towards this elusive goal by describing the design and implementation of the Galois system, a parallel programming model for shared-memory, multicore machines. Central to the design is the idea that scheduling of a program can be decoupled from the core computational operator and data structures. However, efficient programs often require application-specific scheduling to achieve best performance. To bridge this gap, an extensible and abstract scheduling policy language is proposed, which allows programmers to focus on selecting high-level scheduling policies while delegating the tedious task of implementing the policy to a scheduler synthesizer and runtime system. Implementations of deterministic and prioritized scheduling also are described. An evaluation of a well-studied benchmark suite reveals that factoring programs into operators, schedulers and data structures can produce significant performance improvements over unfactored approaches. Comparison of the Galois system with existing programming models for graph analytics shows significant performance improvements, often orders of magnitude more, due to (1) better support for the restrictive programming models of existing systems and (2) better support for more sophisticated algorithms and scheduling, which cannot be expressed in other systems. / text

The ability to obtain complex global behaviour from simple local rules makes cellular automata an interesting platform for massively parallel computation. However, manually designing a cellular automaton to perform a given computation can be extremely tedious, and automated design techniques such as genetic programming have their limitations because of the absence of human intuition. In this thesis, we propose elements of a framework whose goal is to make the manual synthesis of cellular automata rules exhibiting desired global characteristics more programmer-friendly, while maintaining the simplicity of local processing elements. We also demonstrate the power of that framework by using it to provide intuitive yet effective solutions to the two-dimensional majority classification problem, the convex hull of disconnected points problem, and various problems pertaining to node placement in wireless sensor networks. / Thesis (Master, Computing) -- Queen's University, 2007-12-05 10:26:09.591

Like many other multimedia applications, image compression involves a significant amount of data processing for coding images. Sophisticated general-purpose processors with parallel architectures and advanced cache systems can be dedicated to enhancing performance for serial multimedia applications through parallelization. This thesis describes parallelization of the JasPer reference software for the JPEG-2000 image compression standard and presents results from simulation, and from hardware execution on a multicore processor where speedups of more than 2 are obtained with 4 processors. Results from execution and cache behavior analysis are presented to establish the expected speedup and to further characterize JasPer execution. The JasPer encoding process has been analyzed on a single processor for both simulated and hardware execution in order to obtain more insights into application behavior. On recent hardware platforms, the significant contributors to the total execution time have been identified through profiling. The granularity of parallelism for parallelizable loops have been analyzed for execution on real hardware. Cache behavior and memory access pattern have been studied closely for the simulated execution. To facilitate parallelization, selected parallelizable loops have been transformed in order to assist the partitioning of loop iterations for parallel execution and to increase workload granularity and reduce synchronization overhead. These modifications include loop index and body transformation, and loop fusion. A memory access pattern tracking feature has also been introduced for serial and parallel execution of a program in simulation. This feature tracks the number of memory accesses in a particular data region during a particular interval of time in order to gain additional insights into execution behavior. The multithreaded execution of the parallelized JasPer encoder presents a relatively balanced workload which indicates a reasonable efficiency for parallel execution. The generated images have been compared against their original images by using analytical tools to ensure the image quality and to verify correctness. / Thesis (Master, Electrical & Computer Engineering) -- Queen's University, 2011-10-29 00:10:43.437

Clusters of commodity, "off the shelf" workstations have given developers and users access to scalable and affordable computing resources. However, unlike large, symmetric multi-processing machines, these clusters have an up front cost in complexity, both for the developer and the user. Existing software frameworks have attempted to mitigate this complexity with varied success. In most frameworks, the user is forgotten and left to deal with an unwieldy application. This thesis presents the design, development and testing of a new C++ computer programming library, Scopira Agents Library (SAL). SAL is a message passing interface and implementation suitable for building parallel applications, with a focus on developer ease of use and user application deployment specification. The target developers and users of such a solution would be those who prefer an easy to develop library, with simpler deployment and application integration options with acceptable sacrifices to performance and scalability. The novelty of this parallel programming library is that it is more user-friendly than other existing libraries. This novelty has two major facets: (i) programmer-usability and productivity and (ii) application integration. Together, they permit a wider range of programmers to utilize parallel programming in a wider range of new and existing applications. This goal, user-friendliness, is rare among current parallel programming libraries. The result of the novelty is that parallel programming can be embedded into more applications, especially desktop applications. The user base and use cases for parallel applications can be increased, resulting in more efficient use of resources in a variety of applications. With increased efficiency, work can be performed in less time and larger problems can be tackled.

No description available.