A PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF THE MULTIPROCESSOR TESTBED ATTEMPT-0

ATTEMPT-0 is a bus connected multiprocessor testbed which provides bot h the shared memory and the local memory for each processor. In this p aper, we describe the design policy and organization of machine and di scuss on the performance measurement results using five practical para llel applications. Processors share a global shared memory through the Futurebus. A write-through type snoop cache, a local memory and a spe cial synchronization mechanism synchronizer are provided for each proc essor. The evaluation result demonstrates the efficiency of the cooper ated system with the local memory, the synchronizer and the global sha red memory. By using the local memory, performance is improved 10 to 6 0% compared with the case of only the shared memory is used. Meanwhile , through the performance analysis of the Futurebus, we found some pro blems in the arbitration protocol.