Wisconsin Wind Tunnel Project
Wisconsin Wind Tunnel Project
The project focus has centered on three phases of parallel machine design. The first phase examined Cooperative Shared Memory that simplified shared memory hardware by allowing software to manage data movement.
The second phase proposed the more-general Tempest interface that enabled programmers, compilers, and program libraries to implement and use message passing, transparent shared memory, and hybrid combinations of the two.
We are now moving into a third phase which returns to a greater hardware emphasis and seeks to use system-wide prediction and speculation to improve performance even as communication latencies (measured in instruction opportunities) increase (e.g., Coherence Prediction and Multicast Snooping). See also the Wisconsin Multifacet home page.
Furthermore, our parallel machine design foci have and continue to serve as catalysts for a constellation of related research. This research include examinations of SMP cluster design, network interface design, coherence protocol verification, execution-driven simulation, data parallel compilation, path profiling, and cache conscious data allocation and reorganization.
Finally, we have developed and distributed many tools, including software for parallel execution-driven simulation (Wisconsin Wind Tunnel) executable editing (Executable Editing Library), and cache-conscious data allocation and reorganization (ccmalloc and ccmorph).
Overview and Annotated Bibliography