Effects of topology and buffering on a processor farm

摘要

The advantages of a processor farm include dynamic load balancing and low-complexity implementation. The major disadvantage is work starvation. Research has proposed different application-specific or platform-specific models of a processor farm. Few have attempted to study the performance characteristics of a processor farm model under varying system parameters. In this paper, we present the design of a distributed-memory processor farm with a topology-independent communications process architecture which offers reduced work starvation by providing minimal routes for work dissemination and results achnowledgement. We evaluate its performance characteristics under varying network size, topology and buffer requirements.