The Effect of Communication Time Delays in Parallel Computations

Parallel computer architectures utilize a set of computational elements (CE) to achieve performance that is not attainable on a single processor, or CE, computer. A common architecture is the cluster of otherwise independent computers communicating through a shared network. To make use of parallel computing resources, problems must be broken down into smaller units that can be solved individually by each CE while exchanging information with CEs solving other problems. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) National DNA Indexing System (NDIS) and Combined DNA Indexing System (CODIS) software are candidates for parallelization. New methods developed by Wang et al. [4][5][6][12][13] lead naturally to a parallel decomposition of the DNA database search problem while providing orders of magnitude improvements in performance over the current release of the CODIS software. The projected growth of the NDIS database and