Virtual machine and software interface for the dynamically reconfigurable SuperNode multiprocessor

The software interface presented is part of the C-NET programming environment developed for SuperNode. The main idea around which the whole environment has been developed is dynamic reconfiguration. In the first step a computing model was designed that took into account the hardware capabilities of the machine. For reasons that are examined in the paper the authors decided to choose a phase model. In this model a program is designed as a phase machine that can execute sequences of phases separated from one another by synchronisation-reconfiguration points. Each phase is intended to be executed on the graph that suits, in the best possible way, the needs of the performed data movements (bulk-synchrony with reconfiguration). The computing model gave rise to the design of a virtual machine which constituted the starting point of the C-NET development