Homework One - Hardware

Due : Tuesday September 29, 2015

Assignment:

Write short papers (2 pages not counting pictures, graphs or tables) in the form of an executive summary outlining the most important points from the paper given and at least one and preferably two related papers.

  1. Compare the architecture and performance features of the Tainhe-2 (Milky-Way-2) supercomputer with at least one other supercomputer from the Top500 list. A good start for the performance of the Tainhe-2 is the paper Xiangke Liao , Liquan Xiao, Canqun Yang, Yutong Lu; MilkyWay-2 supercomputer: system and application, Frontiers of Computer Science, June 2014, Volume 8, Issue 3, pp 345-356.
  2. Compare the architectures and programming metods for the Nvidia Tesla K20x and Intel Many Integrated Core (Phi 31S1P) architectures. A good start to see the style of such comparisions would be the paper Alexander Heinecke, Michael Klemm and Hans-Joachim Bungartz; From GPGPU to Many-Core: Nvidia Fermi and Intel Many Integrated Core Architecture, Comput. Sci. Eng. 14, 78 (2012). Note that this considers the Nvidia Fermi rather than Tesla though and an earlier version of the Phi.

Hint: Use google scholar (scholar.google.com) to look these up these citation, check the papers which reference them, and also other papers on the topics. You may need to use the library resources to access them. These will mostly be accessible online provided you are on the campus network or have installed and are using the Kent State vpn.

This assignment is an individual assignment, to be done on your own without help from other students in the class. However, you may use any materials from any written resource, including web resources, provided that you include a proper citation. Using text directly from a paper or web source without indicating that it is copied by enclosing it in quotes is considered plagerism and violates University policy. Failure to indicate the source for materials whether directly quoted or rewritten in your own words is also considered inappropriate and may be considered as plagerism. Material used in these assignments, which except for any personal conclusions you make beyond those in the papers read, should have proper citations indicated as in the papers provided.


Submission Process:

The answers to both questions should be submitted as Microsoft Word files using the Kent State Flashline system. They will be submitted to SafeAsign to check for plagerism.