A Restructurable Computer System

This paper presents an architecture for a restructurable computer system which reconfigures its resources according to the problem environment for efficient performance. It converts the user´s program into an intermediate level language called Realist which is capable of specifying arbitrary resource structures such as an array or a pipeline and the computation to be performed upon these structures. An architectural design for the system is presented with special attention to bus units. It is shown how APL, a vector processing language, can be implemented on the system. Some storage schemes are considered for organizing vectors and matrices to facilitate efficient retrieval and manipulation. The paper is concluded with a comparison of the proposed system to existing high speed architectures.