On a Varistructured Array of Microprocessors

Abstract

The varistructure architecture gives the user the opportunity to specify the height and width of his primary memory ``at run time.'' This architecture, first proposed in 1973, has now been simplified to make it schedulable, extended to allow SIMD vector-vector operations, and further extended to provide variable structure within a task. Memory is efficiently utilized in that memory bandwidth can be increased for array processing, yet memory space is not wasted during string processing. The fetch-execute cycle operation is analyzed herein, and some tentative results regarding input-output and data communication between processing entities are reported. On the basis of the simplicity of the fetch-execute cycle, there is hope that this architecture may well be the best way to build minicomputers and large computers using a cellular array of microprocessors.