Mayfly: A general-purpose, scalable, parallel processing architecture

TheMayfly is a scalable general-purpose parallel processing system being designed at HP Laboratories, in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Utah. The system is intended to efficiently support parallel variants of modern programming languages such as Lisp, Prolog, and Object Oriented Programming models. These languages impose a common requirement on the hardware platform to supportdynamic system needs such as runtime type checking and dynamic storage management. The main programming language for the Mayfly is a concurrent dialect of Scheme. The system is based on a distributed-memory model, and communication between processing elements is supported by message passing. The initial prototype of Mayfly will consist of 19 identical processing elements interconnected in a hexagonal mesh structure. In order to achieve the goal of scalable performance, each processing element is a parallel processor as well, which permits the application code, runtime operating system, and communication to all run in parallel. A 7 processing element subset of the prototype is presently operational. This paper describes the hardware architecture after a brief background synopsis of the software system structure.

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