Symmetric Multiprocessor Architecture
Abstract
Symmetric multiprocessing is the most widespread class of shared-memory compute nodes. While nodes of this type can be used as self-contained computers, they serve more frequently as a building block of larger systems such as clusters. This chapter discusses typical components of a symmetric multiprocessing node and their functions, parameters, and associated interfaces. An updated version of Amdahl's law that takes overhead in account is introduced, along with other formulae determining peak computational performance of a node and the impact of memory hierarchy on a metric known as “cycles per instruction”. Finally, a number of commonly used industry-standard interfaces are discussed that ...
Get High Performance Computing now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
