Optimisation, Distribution and Parallelisation
Shared Memory Parallelism
- Basic idea:
-
- Multiple CPU cores share memory
- Divide calculation between the CPUs — faster execution times (hopefully)
- CPUs communicate via the shared memory
- Specialised HPC shared memory machines have been around for many years.
- Modern desktop/laptops now allow shared memory parallelism:
- Number of processor cores is increasing
- CPU clock speed remaining more or less constant
- Parallelism required to utilise the full power of these processors