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Abstract This paper introduces an event‐based computing paradigm, where workers only perform computation in response to external stimuli (events). This approach is best employed on hardware with many thousands of smaller compute cores with a fast, low‐latency interconnect, as opposed to traditional computers with fewer and faster cores. Event‐based computing is timely because it provides an alternative to traditional big computing, which suffers from immense infrastructural and power costs. This paper presents four case study applications, where an event‐based computing approach finds solutions to orders of magnitude more quickly than the equivalent traditional big compute approach, including problems in computational chemistry and condensed matter physics.

Abstract One of the key problems in designing and implementing graph analysis algorithms for distributed platforms is to find an optimal way of managing communication flows in the massively parallel processing network. Message‐passing and global synchronization are powerful abstractions in this regard, especially when used in combination. This paper studies the use of a hardware‐implemented refutable global barrier as a design optimization technique aimed at unifying these abstractions at the API level. The paper explores the trade‐offs between the related overheads and performance factors on a message‐passing prototype machine with 49,152 RISC‐V threads distributed over 48 FPGAs (called the Partially Ordered Event‐Triggered Systems platform). Our experiments show that some graph applications favour synchronized communication, but the effect is hard to predict in general because of the interplay between multiple hardware and software factors. A classifier model is therefore proposed and implemented to perform such a prediction based on the application graph topology parameters: graph diameter, degree of connectivity, and reconvergence metric. The presented experimental results demonstrate that the correct choice of communication mode, granted by the new model‐driven approach, helps to achieve 3.22 times faster computation time on average compared to the baseline platform operation.