The PASM project: a study of reconfigurable parallel computing

Author

Siegel, Howard Jay ; Braun, Tracy D. ; Dietz, Henry G. ; Kulaczewski, Mark B. ; Maheswaran, Muthucumaru ; Pero, Pierre ; Siegel, Janet M. ; So, John John E ; Tan, Min ; Theys, Mitchell D. ; Wang, Lee

Author_Institution

Parallel Process. Lab., Purdue Univ., West Lafayette, IN, USA

fYear

1996

fDate

12-14 Jun 1996

Firstpage

529

Lastpage

536

Abstract

PASM is a concept for a parallel processing system that allows experimentation with different architectural design alternatives. PASM is dynamically reconfigurable along three dimensions: partitionability into independent or communicating submachines, variable interprocessor connections, and mixed-mode SIMD/MIMD parallelism. With mixed-mode parallelism, a program can switch between SIMD (synchronous) and MIMD (asynchronous) parallelism at instruction-level granularity, allowing the use of both modes in a single machine. The PASM concept is presented, showing the ways in which reconfiguration can be accomplished. Trade-offs among SIMD/MIMD, and mixed-mode parallelism are explored. The small-scale PASM prototype with 16 processing elements is described. The ELP mixed-mode programming language used on the prototype is discussed. An example of a prototype-based study that demonstrates the potential of mixed-mode parallelism is given

Keywords

parallel architectures; reconfigurable architectures; MIMD; PASM; SIMD; dynamically reconfigurable; instruction-level granularity; mixed-mode parallelism; partitionability; reconfigurable parallel computing; Broadcasting; Communication switching; Concurrent computing; Costs; Decoding; Hardware; Parallel processing; Prototypes; Switches; Yarn;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Parallel Architectures, Algorithms, and Networks, 1996. Proceedings., Second International Symposium on

Conference_Location

Beijing

ISSN

1087-4089

Print_ISBN

0-8186-7460-1

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ISPAN.1996.509036

Filename

509036