Parallelism in Bubba

Bubba is a parallel computer system for data intensive applications under design at MCC. Bubba is intended as a replacement for mainframe systems providing scalable, continuous, high-performance-per-dollar access to large amounts of shared data for a large number of concurrent application types. To meet these ambitious goals, we adopted a data-driven, message passing army of ants approach. In this talk I provide a brief rationale for this choice. I then discuss some implications. Next I describe a number of the mechanisms used to enable and manage parallelism in Bubba. I conclude with an outline of the research methodology used.