PASM (partitionable SIMD/MIND machine) parallel-processing system: Hardware design and intelligent operating system concepts. Final report
Many of today's scientific and industrial problems require enormous computing power. Since circuit switching speeds are reaching fundamental limits, avenues to speed up computations other than that using faster components are being explored. One such avenue is the use of parallelism. PASM is a dynamically reconfigurable SIMD/MIMD parallel processing system with up to 1,024 processing elements (PEs). It can be dynamically reconfigured to work as one or more SIMD (single instruction stream - multiple data stream) and/or MIMD (multiple instruction stream - multiple data stream) machines. A prototype with 30 MC68010 microprocessors, including 16 PEs in the computational engine, is being designed and constructed. The design of the prototype hardware is described, as well as the design tradeoffs that were made. Extending the current prototype by the addition of a Network Interface Unit (NIU) to each PE is proposed. Such an NIU significantly enhances interprocessor communication by offloading communication overhead from the PE's main CPU. One way to extend the prototype design to a system with 1,024 processors in the computational engine is presented. The powerful reconfiguration capabilities of PASM can be fully utilized only if all tradeoffs influencing reconfiguration are known.
- Research Organization:
- Purdue Univ., Lafayette, IN (USA). School of Electrical Engineering
- OSTI ID:
- 5634622
- Report Number(s):
- AD-A-208699/9/XAB
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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