language: en

THE PAPIA2 MACHINE: HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURE

A. Biancardi, V. Cantoni, M. Ferretti and M. Mosconi
Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica University of Pavia
Via Abbiategrasso 209 I-27100 PAVIA, ITALY

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ABSTRACT This paper presents the overall structure of PAPIA2, a pyramid system belonging to the family of massive parallel machines. It embeds the topology of the quad-pyramid into a highly regular, fault tolerant, eight-connected proces sor array by means of specially reconfigurable near-neighbor interconnections. The system comes with a fully-fledged software environment designed to optimize the use of machine resources. The highly interactive graphic tools help in understanding the machine's capabilities, provide a valuable testbed for the machine instruction set, and offer a suitable context for monitoring program execution.

1. Introduction