uthoene@water.waterloo.edu (U.Thoene) (08/21/89)
DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO SEMINAR ACTIVITIES MASTER'S ESSAY PRESENTATION - Thursday, August 24, 1989 Mr. Stephen Rees, Computer Science Graduate Student, will speak on ``A Survey of Distributed Matrix Multiplication Techniques on Shoshin''. TIME: 1:30 PM ROOM: DC3540 ABSTRACT This essay discusses the development and refinement of several distributed matrix multiplication algorithms. Our goal in this research has been to determine if successful distribution of this problem is possible within a loosely-coupled environment. Our criteria for success are fast execution speed and, to a lesser extent, memory efficiency. Our results indicate that, perhaps counter-intuitively, it IS possible to use distribution to improve the performance of dense matrix multiplication. The speed increase obtained ranges up to more than fifty percent, depending upon the algorithm and the process configuration used. Among the factors affecting performance are computational complexity, number and size of interprocess messages, and bookkeeping overhead.