A demand driven multiprocessor.

Abstract

It is thought that fast low cost computers can be built by employing large numbers of cheap microprocessors working together in a system. However increasing the number of microprocessors in a parallel computer system may not produce a linear increase in performance for general purpose programming. The problems seem to lie in the communication between processors and the method of exploiting parallelism. A multiprocessor system was constructed using six MC68000 microprocessors. The problems of communication and exploiting parallelism were tackled in the design of the multiprocessor system. The component processors in a multiprocessor system communicate with each other through a communication channel. It is essential that the communication hardware has a high bandwidth. A fast communication hardware was implemented based on a two port shared memory. One method of extracting parallelism in a computing problem is by using divide and conquer. A software system was developed that enables the multiprocessor to exploit parallelism derived by the divide and conquer method. A software kernel is employed to manage the scheduling of parallel tasks to processors and the communication between processors. The mode of computation is based on the demand driven model.

Date of Award	1985
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bath