Home Contact Us Site Map  
 
       
    next up previous contents
Next: 4.2.3 WRAPPER machine model Up: 4.2 WRAPPER Previous: 4.2.1 Target hardware   Contents

4.2.2 Supporting hardware neutrality

The different systems listed in section 4.2.1 can be categorized in many different ways. For example, one common distinction is between shared-memory parallel systems (SMP and PVP) and distributed memory parallel systems (for example x86 clusters and large MPP systems). This is one example of a difference between compute platforms that can impact an application. Another common distinction is between vector processing systems with highly specialized CPUs and memory subsystems and commodity microprocessor based systems. There are numerous other differences, especially in relation to how parallel execution is supported. To capture the essential differences between different platforms the WRAPPER uses a machine model.



mitgcm-support@mitgcm.org
Copyright © 2006 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Last update 2011-01-09