Architecture and performance of a multicomputer type digital signal processing system 'NOVI'

The authors introduce a parallel DSP (digital signal processing) system called NOVI, consisting of 36 processor nodes. NOVI has a multicomputer architecture, which provides high programmability and effective scheduling capability. Its program-development-assist system facilitates powerful debugging functions to observe all states of NOVI and to control its execution. Each processor node comprises a transputer, a floating-point ALU (arithmetic logic unit), and 1 Mbyte of local memory, which can deal with even rather large tasks within a single node. An interconnection board allows easy reconfiguration into various network topologies.<<ETX>>