Date: Tue, 10 Dec 1996 21:47:45 GMT Server: NCSA/1.4.2 Content-type: text/html Last-modified: Tue, 28 Feb 1995 07:07:10 GMT Content-length: 1084 Collective Communications

Collective Communications

Collective communications are routines that require greater than two processors to communicate in order to carry out some global operation on distributed data. This is in contrast to a point-to-point operation such as a simple send/receive or data exchange. These operations include broadcast, reduction, scatter/gather, combine, scan (or parallel prefix).

These operations can be found in explicitly written parallel applications, remapping of data, updating of globals in a distributed memory environment, synchronizing a group of processes, library routines optimized for the particular interconnection.


W. Derrick Weathersby