RECONFIGURABLE SIMD MASSIVELY PARALLEL COMPUTERS

Reconfigurable SIMD parallel processor is a member of SIMD architectures. Its most distinguished feature is the utilization of the reconfigurability of the interconnection network to 1) establish a network topology well mapped to the algorithm communication graph so that higher efficiency can be achieved, and to 2) remove faulty processors from the network so that the system operation can be kept uninterrupted while maintaining the same or slightly degraded efficiency. This paper describes several existing reconfigurable SIMD parallel architectures and their reconfiguration mechanism, demonstrates the effectiveness of algorithm mapping through reconfiguration, and discusses fault tolerant schemes via reconfiguration.