The ETH-Multiprocessor Empress: A Dynamically Configurable MIMD System

The MIMD multiprocessor EMPRESS (ETH-Multiprocessor) to be described was built in order to study the performance of MIMD architectures in general, and particularly in the field of simulation problems. By means of a dynamically configurable architecture in combination with a powerful processor intercommunication principle, the system is able to handle two-stage parallelism: several independent subtasks with inherent parallelism can be run simultaneously. This concept incorporates features of a quite general nature allowing in principle the implementation of other software.