The Melbourne University heterogeneous multiprocessor

The Melbourne University heterogeneous multiprocessor is an experimental multiple-input multiple-data (MIMD) multiprocessor with different processing elements and is based on a shared memory architecture. The authors discuss the overall structure of the multiprocessor, and concentrate on the bus arbitration and the synchronization techniques used. Results based on a parallel implementation of the Sieve of Eratosthenes are presented. The results indicate that for a three-processor system, the memory contention is fairly small (even though the processors access the common memory repeatedly), and that the heterogeneous multiprocessor achieves a good speedup over the uniprocessor system (approximately 1.5×) for a small increase in cost