A STEP TOWARDS LARGE-SCALE PARALLELISM - BUILDING A PARALLEL COMPUTING ENVIRONMENT FROM HETEROGENOUS RESOURCES

MPP industry has recently suffered from economical problems: various c ompanies have disappeared from the market. Traditional vector system v endors, such as IBM, Gray and Convex, have entered the marketplace wit h their new systems based on standard RISC-technology. Competition and risks in massively parallel processing have increased. The real break through of the parallel systems has not yet happened. Lack of software and tools makes the transition to MPP slow. In order to minimize the risks, a careful approach is to train the user base first with the exi sting computer resources, which generally include some RISC processors or clusters. A set of tools is available for the user, such as PVM. P ilot projects in order to promote MPP programming are necessary. In a heterogeneous environment, a special attention should be given in load balancing and efficient usage of the resources. The Center for Scient ific Computing (CSC) in Finland has been running moderately parallel s hared memory systems from the end of 1980s and additionally PVM cluste rs and IBM SP2 distributed memory system for the last few years in ord er to prepare for large scale parallelism. In the end of 1994 CSC made a decision to purchase a 192-processor Gray's future generation MPP s ystem, which will be installed during 1996. The selection of the paral lel tools is large and everyone of them cannot be supported. In order to concentrate the efforts, choice of technology has to be made. The n ext few years will demonstrate the abilities of the maturing compiler technology of the parallel systems. One choice of supported software t ools and assumption of the compiler technology development have been p resented in this paper.