General-purpose systolic arrays

The extension of systolic array architecture from fixed- or special-purpose architectures to general-purpose, SIMD (single-instruction stream, multiple-data stream), MIMD (multiple-instruction stream, multiple-data stream) architectures, and hybrid architectures that combine both commercial and FPGA (field-programmable gate array) technologies is chronicled. The authors present a taxonomy for systolic organizations, discuss each architecture´s methods of exploiting concurrencies, and compare performance attributes of each. The authors also describe a number of implementation issues that determine a systolic array´s performance efficiency, such as algorithms and mapping, system integration through memory subsystems, cell granularity, and extensibility to a wide variety of topologies.<>