A Grimm collection of MIMD fairy tales

Abstract

The authors present two tales about massively parallel processors: 'Who is Fairest of Us All?' and 'The SPMD Path.' With a twist of humor, the tales discuss single-instruction multiple-data systems (SIMD), multiple-instruction multiple-data (MIMD) systems, differences, and the single program multiple data (SPMD) programming model. The first tale introduces autonomous SIMD (ASIMD), and then looks at the flexibility, programmability, cost, and effectiveness of MIMD and ASIMD systems. It is shown that ASIMD systems have the flexibility to solve real applications cost-effectively. The second tale describes the simple path that SPMD provides for programming, and why an ASIMD machine works well.<>