An experimental parallel microprocessor system

The Computing Division at the Los Alamos National Laboratory has designed and is building a parallel microprocessor system (PμPS) to serve as a research tool for evaluating parallel processing of large-scale scientific codes. The PμPS is an experimental architecture consisting of an orthogonal array of 20 processing elements by 32 memory elements, establishing a tightly coupled shared memory (16-Mbyte) machine. The hardware incorporates very-large-scale integration components, such as 16-bit microprocessors, floating-point co-processors and dynamic random access memories. The design replaces the conventional medium-scale integration or small-scale integration circuitry with programmable array logic, logic sequencers and logic arrays. This experimental system, which is only one element of the parallel processing research being done by the Laboratory's Computing Division, will enable direct comparisons of speed-ups of algorithms for a variety of multiprocessor architectures.