A study of vector and parallel processing

This document is a thesis for a Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering. This thesis explains the relevance of vector processing and parallel processing, the program candidate selection procedures, and my vector-enabling and parallel-enabling procedures, experiences, and results. This thesis also provides supplemental information about the supercomputing facilities available to researchers at the University of Tennessee, the target supercomputer (the IBM 3090), how vector and parallel processing work, the available software tools, and Amdahl's Law.

My research focused on two programs: AKCESS and a benchmark program. AKCESS is a set of programs that form a general-purpose finite element modeling tool. I vector-enabled its single-program computational engine. I developed the benchmark program to exploit vector and parallel processing. With it, I estimated the IBM 3090's scalar, vector, and parallel computation rates.