Communication in a Tree Machine

Abstract

Communication assumes a progressively dominant and limiting role in VLSI because it becomes relatively more expensive in chip area, signal energy, and time. The principle of locality becomes alI important to integrated systems design, and implies that larger single processors are not the route to performance improvements. One computer architecture that can exploit the capabilities of VLSI is an ensemble of small processors operating concurrently. The tree machine is such a structure. Each of the many processors in the binary tree can communicate directly only with its parent and two children. However, the tree is programmed as if each processor had an arbitrary number of descendents, and the programs are compiled into code for a binary tree. We describe the communication structure of tree machine programs, the compilation process, and the underlying hardware.