The Kyushu University reconfigurable parallel processor: design of memory and intercommunicaiton architectures

The reconfigurable parallel processor system under development at Kyushu University is an MIMD-type multiprocessor which consists of N processing-elements (currently N is 128) fully connected by S N × N crossbar networks (currently S is 1). Each PE (Processing Element) employs a Fujitsu SPARC MB86900/10 chip-set, a Weitek WTL1164/65 chip-set, an MMU (Memory Management Unit) with 64K bytes of cache, 4M bytes of memory, and an MCU (Message Communication Unit). The modular 128 × 128 crossbar network is implemented by arranging 256 identical 8 × 8 crossbar LSI-modules in a 16 × 16 matrix form. The full 128-PE configuration achieves supercomputer levels of performance by providing 1.28 GIPS and 205 MFLOPS of computing power, 512M bytes of memory, and 2.56G bytes/s of inter-PE communication bandwidth. At the same time, it exploits unique reconfigurability in the memory and intercommunication architectures. By utilizing these two types of reconfigurability, we believe that the system can be effectively tailored to a wide spectrum of applications such as numerical computation, image processing, computer graphics, artificial intelligence, neurocomputing, and so on.

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