An architecture of a dataflow single chip processor

Abstract

A highly parallel (more than a thousand) dataflow machine EM-4 is now under development. The EM-4 design principle is to construct a high performance computer using a compact architecture by overcoming several defects of dataflow machines. Constructing the EM-4, it is essential to fabricate a processing element (PE) on a single chip for reducing operation speed, system size, design complexity and cost. In the EM-4, the PE , called EMC-R, has been specially designed using a 50,000-gate gate array chip. This paper focuses on an architecture of the EMC-R. The distinctive features of it are: a strongly connected arc dataflow model; a direct matching scheme; a RISC-based design; a deadlock-free on-chip packet switch; and an integration of a packet-based circular pipeline and a register-based advanced control pipeline. These features are intensively examined, and the instruction set architecture and the configuration architecture which exploit them are described.