ABSTRACT
The Meiko Computing Surface provides heterogeneous parallel technology, combining fast processing resources, high-speed configurable point-to-point interconnection, and high-level software that makes a scalable and efficient parallel-processing system. A typical application for the Computing Surface is at the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, Cambridge, MA, to process and analyze images created by side-scanning sonar. The Draper laboratory Computing Surface uses eight high-speed Inmos T800 transputer processors attached to a Sun-4 computer system. The Sun-4 gathers data and sends them to the Computing Surface for median filtering. The overall system management and control of the Computing Surface is provided by the System Supervisor. This is a bidirectional bus, orthogonal to and independent of the links network, communicating with all computing elements via custom VLSI devices and controlled by a module host. The Computing Surface architecture fundamentally consists of a collection of heterogeneous processing nodes connected via a high-performance communication network overlaid by a processor-independent parallel-processing environment.
