IBM RESEARCH PARALLEL PROCESSOR PROTOTYPE (RP3): INTRODUCTION AND ARCHITECTURE.

Abstract

As a research effort to investigate both hardware and software aspects of highly parallel computation, the Research Parallel Processor Project (RP3) has been initiated in the IBM Research Division, in cooperation with the Ultracomputer Project of the Courant Institute of NYU. The RP3 machine being designed is a highly parallel MIMD design with a uniquely flexible organization encompassing both shared-memory paradigms and local memory message-passing paradigms, as well as mixtures of the two chosen at run time. It is being designed to accommodate 512 state-of-the-art microprocessors. A full configuration will provide up to 1. 3 GIPS, 800 MFLOPS, 1-2 Gbytes of main storage, 192 Mbytes/s I/O rate, and 13 Gbytes/s interprocessor communication. Performance evaluations indicate that approximately 1 GIPS performance should be sustainable.