HPP: A High Performance PRAM

We present a fast shared memory multiprocessor with uniform memory access time. A first prototype (SB-PRAM) is running with 4 processors, a 128 processor version is under construction. A second implementation (HPP) using latest VLSI technology and high speed links shall run at a speed of 96 MHz. To achieve this speed, we first investigate a re-design of the hardware of the SB-PRAM. We then balance processor speed and memory bandwidth by investigating the relation between local computation and global memory access in several benchmark applications. On numerical codes such as Linpack 2 resp. 8 GFlop/s shall be possible with 128 resp. 512 processors, thus approaching processor performance of an Intel Paragon XPS. On non-numerical codes, i.e., circuit simulation and ray tracing, we achieve speedups over a one processor SGI challenge of 35 and 81 for 128 processors and 140 and 327 for 512 processors.

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