Parallel Processors

Computer architecture parallelism is explained with task-level parallelism and is also called process-level parallelism. Task-level parallelism is “utilizing multiple processors by running independent programs simultaneously” (Patterson & Hennessy, 2014, sect. 6.1). The overall goal of computer architecture parallelism is better performance and better energy efficiency. The basic purpose of a multiprocessor is to speed up how many instructions it can completed within a clock cycle. According to Patterson and Hennessy (2014) the difficulty lies with writing correct programs to take full advantage multiprocessing. When programs are not written correctly it is similar to using instruction level parallelism with a uniprocessor.

To increase the speed of a multiprocessor, three things must be achieved. Strong scaling, weak scaling, and load balancing. Strong scaling is speeding up the multiprocessor while not making the instruction larger, and weak scaling is increasing the size of the instruction to be proportional to the size of the multiprocessor (Patterson & Hennessy, 2014). Strong scaling is used to complete programs that take a long time to complete. The example our textbook uses the process of completing an ATM transaction. Strong scaling would be used to assist a customer’s transaction in thirty seconds instead of two minutes. Weak scaling is the opposite, it is used to complete larger more complex instructions. The third method, load balancing, is giving each processor an equal amount of work to do so that it improves efficiency and performance.

A GPU or graphic processing unit gained popularity with gaming consoles and computer gaming. GPUs can also be used mine crypto currency. The two characteristics of how GPUs differ from CPUs are that GPUs “are accelerators that supplement the CPU” and a GPUs “problems sizes are typically hundreds of megabytes to gigabytes, but not hundreds of gigabytes to terabytes” (Patterson & Hennessy, 2014, sect. 6.6). Because a GPU supplements a CPU, it does not need to do the same things a CPU does so it can focus solely on what it needs to get done, which is graphics.

References

Patterson, D. A., & Hennessy, J. L. (2014). Computer organization and design: The hardware/software interface (5th ed.). Retrieved from https://zybooks.zyante.com/

Soloman, D. A., Russinovich, M. E., & Ionescu, A. (2007). Windows Internals. Retrieved 9 December, 2021, from https://books.google.com/books

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