ABSTRACT
This chapter reports a powerful computer system that is currently under development at the advanced automation research laboratory (AARL) of Purdue University. The system consists of hundreds of LSI bit-slice microprocessors with a large number of shared memory modules and flexible interconnection networks for efficient image processing and pattern recognition applications. The processors used in the multiprocessor system must have certain desirable characteristics in order to handle the multi-modal requirements of the purdue multimode multimicroprocessor 4 (PM) system architecture. The parallel programming language will provide the user the power to exploit the full capacity of the system. This will include vector operations, and two or more distinct vector operations in parallel. Instruction fetch and execution may be overlapped in both the vector control unit (VCU) and PM consists of N identical processor-memory units (PMU) by prefetching the instructions in both stream and multiple data streams (SIMD) and multiple data stream class (MIMD) modes.
