MODELS OF MACHINES AND COMPUTATION FOR MAPPING IN MULTICOMPUTERS

It is now more than a quarter of a century since researchers started p ublishing papers on mapping strategies for distributing computation ac ross the computation resources of multiprocessor systems. There exists a large body of literature on the subject, but there is no commonly a ccepted framework whereby results in the field can be compared. Nor is it always easy to assess the relevance of a new result to a particula r problem. Furthermore, changes in parallel computing technology have made some of the earlier work of less relevance to current multiproces sor systems. In this paper, versions of the mapping problem are classi fied, and research in the field is considered in terms of its relevanc e to the problem of programming currently available hardware in the fo rm of a distributed-memory multiple instruction stream multiple data s tream computer: a multicomputer.