The M-machine multicomputer

Marco Fillo, Stephen W. Keckler, William J. Dally, Nicholas P. Carter, Andrew Chang, Yevgeny Gurevich, Whay S. Lee
1997 International journal of parallel programming  
The M-Machine is an experimental multicomputer being developed to test architectural concepts motivated by the constraints of modern semiconductor technology and the demands of programming systems. The M-Machine computing nodes are connected with a 3-D mesh network; each node is a multithreaded processor incorporating 12 function units, on-chip cache, and local memory. The multiple function units are used to exploit both instruction-level and thread-level parallelism. A user accessible message
more » ... assing system yields fast communication and synchronization between nodes. Rapid access to remote memory is provided transparently to the user with a combination of hardware and software mechanisms. This paper presents the architecture of the M-Machine and describes how its mechanisms attempt to maximize both single thread performance and overall system throughput. The architecture is complete and the MAP chip, which will serve as the M-Machine processing node, is currently being implemented.
doi:10.1007/bf02700035 fatcat:b5utkjnigjhl5cp7ofxrhxpj7e