| OCR Text |
Show 51 a central role in any application which needs to use the Butterfly memory effectively. The Butterfly is unique among commercial shared-memory multiprocessors in that it can be extended to a maximum of 256 nodes. In its maximum configuration, it contains a very large number of processors compared with other commercial system which rely on common busses for communication between processors and memory. Since the switch capacity grows with the size of the system, communication overhead does not vacy greatly as the system grows. Because of these architectural facts, design decisions for other shared-memocy multiprocessors may not extend readily to the Butterfly. If the design of an application assumes a small number of processors, for example, it may perform poorly on a large Butterfly (although it may perform quite well on a small Butterfly). |
