ABSTRACT
The availability of a variety of parallel computers has led to a serious concern about the scalability of their architectures. The test problem used for the performance analysis is the solution of a tridiagonal system (TDS) of linear equations. TDS of linear equations form a very important class of linear algebraic equations. For experimental results, the method is implemented on the Butterfly computer using different problem sizes and different processor configurations ranging from 1 to 80. The Uniform System software creates an environment in which tasks may be distributed to processors without regard to the physical location of the data associated with the tasks. The application scalability characteristics of the Butterfly multiprocessor system are analyzed by mapping an application onto its architecture. A block partitioning method of solving a linear TDS equation is implemented and analyzed in terms of its performance on the 80-node Butterfly parallel computer.
