Baring it all to software: Raw machines

The most radical of the architectures that appear in this issue are Raw processors-highly parallel architectures with hundreds of very simple processors coupled to a small portion of the on-chip memory. Each processor, or tile, also contains a small bank of configurable logic, allowing synthesis of...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Computer (Long Beach, Calif.) Calif.), 1997-09, Vol.30 (9), p.86-93
Main Authors: Waingold, E., Taylor, M., Srikrishna, D., Sarkar, V., Lee, W., Lee, V., Kim, J., Frank, M., Finch, P., Barua, R., Babb, J., Amarasinghe, S., Agarwal, A.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Application software
Computer architecture
Computer science
Hardware
Information processing
Information technology
Laboratories
Logic
Microprocessors
Parallel processing
Registers
Switches
Tiles
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Summary:The most radical of the architectures that appear in this issue are Raw processors-highly parallel architectures with hundreds of very simple processors coupled to a small portion of the on-chip memory. Each processor, or tile, also contains a small bank of configurable logic, allowing synthesis of complex operations directly in configurable hardware. Unlike the others, this architecture does not use a traditional instruction set architecture. Instead, programs are compiled directly onto the Raw hardware, with all units told explicitly what to do by the compiler. The compiler even schedules most of the intertile communication. The real limitation to this architecture is the efficacy of the compiler. The authors demonstrate impressive speedups for simple algorithms that lend themselves well to this architectural model, but whether this architecture will be effective for future workloads is an open question.
ISSN:0018-9162
1558-0814
DOI:10.1109/2.612254