A massively parallel virtual machine for SIMD architectures

Abstract

In this paper, we present a new model of a massively parallel Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) structure machines in a distributed system. Among the modeled machines, we distinguish the linear, 2D, 3D meshes, pyramidal structures and GPU structure. All these computers are based physically on a multitude of fine grained processing elements (PE) arranged and coupled according to their associated topological pattern. In this model the host is represented by a distributed agent. Each virtual host agent, deployed in a physical computer, manages a local parallel virtual computer composed by a set of virtual processing elements (VPE). Each VPE is represented by a self threaded object. The distributed virtual host agents are interconnected throw a multi agent system platform. The developed software is based on a hard kernel of a parallel virtual machine in which we translate all the physical properties of its different components. This kernel is based on an abstract layer which can be easily extended to the other topological structures. To implement a parallel program in the proposed platform, we have developed a new parallel programming language based on XML and its compiler which allow editing, compiling and running parallel programs. To illustrate the performance of this model, we present an example of a parallel program implementation for the edge detection of a brain MRI image presenting pathology. 238 M. Youssfi, O. Bouattane and M. O. Bensalah