A parallel pipelined data flow coprocessor

ABSTRACT

A parallel pipelined data flow coprocessor has been developed for the 68000 based Commodore Amiga workstation. The coprocessor, based on Nippon Electric Corporation's &mgr;PD7281 Image Pipelined Processor (ImPP), was designed as an algorithm processor for numerically intensive applications such as image processing, image synthesis, and numerical analysis. The coprocessor can accomodate up to seven of the 5-MIPS ImPP's providing over 30 MIPS of processing power to dedicated tasks. The ImPP's act as true coprocessor's providing a multi-processor arrangement consisting of the 68000 and the coprocessor's parallel pipeline. The workstation and parallel processors share all system resources including memory and peripherals. The coprocessor has its own DMA capabilities for transferring program code and data between the workstation and the pipeline. The coprocessor is completely programmable via a development environment running native on the Amiga, including an assembler, a simulator, and a runtime library. Additional programming tools are also being developed.

REFERENCES

• Gurd 85: J. R Gurd , C. C Kirkham , I. Watson, The Manchester prototype dataflow computer, Communications of the ACM, v.28 n.1, p.34-52, Jan. 1985 [doi>10.1145/2465.2468]
• Jeff 85: T. Jeffery, "The uPD7281 Processor," Byte, November, 1985, pp 237-246
• McGr 85: J. McGraw et al., SISAL: Streams and Iteration in a Single-Assignment Language: Reference Manual, Ver. 1.2, Manual M-146, Rev. 1, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, Calif., 1985
• Mine 87: R. Miner et al., "Parallel DataFlow Coprocessor," University of Lowell CPE Technical Report, March 1987, WP 87-1
• Olde 88: Rodney R. Oldehoeft , David C. Cann, Applicative Parallelism on a Shared-Memory Multiprocessor, IEEE Software, v.5 n.1, p.62-70, January 1988 [doi>10.1109/52.1995]
• Veen 86: Arthur H. Veen, Dataflow machine architecture, ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), v.18 n.4, p.365-396, Dec. 1986 [doi>10.1145/27633.28055]
• Yuba 87: T. Yuba , K. Hiraki , T. Shimada , S. Sekiguchi , K. Nishida, The SIGMA-1 dataflow computer, Proceedings of the 1987 Fall Joint Computer Conference on Exploring technology: today and tomorrow, p.578-585, December 1987, Dallas, Texas, United States

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.1 PROCESSOR ARCHITECTURES
      C.1.3 Other Architecture Styles
          Subjects: Data-flow architectures

Additional Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.1 PROCESSOR ARCHITECTURES
      C.1.2 Multiple Data Stream Architectures (Multiprocessors)
          Subjects: Parallel processors**
  C.5 COMPUTER SYSTEM IMPLEMENTATION
      C.5.3 Microcomputers

          Nouns: IBM PC

General Terms:
Design