The physical structure of concurrent problems and concurrent computers

Abstract

We introduce a physical analogy to describe problems and high-performance concurrent computers on which they are run. We show that the spatial characteristics of problems lead to their parallelism and review the lessons from use of the early hypercubes and a natural particle-process analogy. We generalize this picture to include the temporal structure of problems and show how this allows us to unify distributed, shared and hierarchical memories as well as SIMD (single instruction multiple data) architectures. We also show how neural network methods can be used to analyse a general formalism based on interacting strings and these lead to possible real-time schedulers and decomposers for massively parallel machines.

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