[net.arch] hypercube demo programs

cov@rice.EDU (Rick Covington) (09/08/86)

I am currently learning about the hypercube and am writing some
simple demo programs.  There does not appear to be a newsgroup for
the hypercube so I am posting to net.arch.  Forgive me if this is an
old topic.  I am relatively new to the net.

I would like to know if anyone has already developed a nice set of
C language demo programs (3 to 6, say) for the hypercube, which are
of intermediate complexity, and which reasonably demonstrate most of
the features of the machine.  In particular, I want application
programs which are more complex than just having a collection
of processes continuously pass a single message around in a ring, but
which are still not so complex that a high-level understanding of the
structure of the program would require hours of studying the code.
For example, simple linear algebra operations, although rather
simple, would be okay (e.g., matrix-matrix multiply).  Obviously,
there are lots of other moderately complex algorithms out there which
lend themselves naturally to loosely-coupled parallel solutions
(e.g., 2-dim FFT's).  Note that I am less interested in hot-shot
efficient (and therefore possibly proprietary) programs than I am
in good demo programs of run-of-the-mill efficiency.

The particular system I'm working on is an Intel iPSC/D4 (16
processors).  Demo programs developed for larger versions would be
okay, too.

In addition to information on the demo programs, any general comments
on programming experience with the hypercube (critiques, opinions,
praise, flames, caveats) would be welcome as well.

Please reply by e-mail.

Thanks.

Rick Covington.