[ont.events] UW Num. Analy. Seminar, Prof. Ostlund on "WATERLOOPS: New Resources for ..."

mwang (02/01/83)

               DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
               UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO
               SEMINAR ACTIVITIES

               NUMERICAL ANLYSIS SEMINAR - Friday, February 11, 1983.

               Prof. N. Ostlund of this  department  will  speak  on
               "WATERLOOPS:  New  Resources  for  Experimentation in
               Parallel Processing".

               TIME:  3:30 PM

               ROOM:  M&C 5158

               ABSTRACT

               Two versions of a new  multiple  processor  architec-
               ture,   the  systolic  loop  (WATERLOOP),  are  under
               current development at the  University  of  Waterloo.
               One  of these is a 3 processor loop that uses the new
               National Semiconductor 16032 chip.  The other is a 64
               processor  loop that uses the Intel 8086 and 8087 co-
               processors.

               These efforts will  provide  experimental  facilities
               for  exploring  research questions in all three major
               areas of parallel computation  -  algorithm  develop-
               ment, software development, and hardware development.
               The purpose of the  talk  will  be  to  describe  the
               present  status  of  the  project.  An effort will be
               made to entice other members of  the  community  into
               orienting  aspects  of then research towards systolic
               processing, since practical  testbeds  for  exploring
               systolic  algorithms  will soon be available.  The 64
               processor version will be a significant computational
               resource, since it presents up to 8-10 times the pro-
               cessing power of a VAX-11/780 even for numerical  ap-
               plications  requiring 64-bit floating point arithmet-
               ic.

                      February 1, 1983