The M-Machine Multicomputer

Marco Fillo, Stephen W. Keckler, William J. Dally, Nicholas P. Carter, Andrew Chang, Yevgeny Gurevich, Whay S. Lee

Abstract

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 passing 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 maximize both single thread performance and overall system throughput.

Keywords

parallel computer architecture, instruction level, parallelism, multithreading, message passing, memory coherency

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