VLIW-in-the-large: a model for fine grain parallelism exploitation on distributed memory multiprocessors

ABSTRACT

VLIW architectures have been shown to be able to exploit large amounts of fine grain parallelism in the execution of sequential imperative programs. In this paper, a new computing model is presented, which allows the VLIW techniques to be adopted to operate a distributed memory, multiprocessor machine. The model, called VLIW-in-the-large, can be adopted in conjunction with a suitable hardware framework to obtain consistent speedups in the execution of both sequential and parallel-natured software. In this paper, we will show that the advantages of the VLIW-in-the-large computing model with respect to the classical VLIW approach are: i) better utilization of hardware resources, ii) extension of the applicability of the VLIW techniques to multiprocessor architectures, in such a way that they can be used for multi-style, multi-grain parallelism exploitation, iii) compact realization of processing elements, suitable for VLSI massively parallel architectures.