The execube parallel processor chip and cellular automata for tactical route planning

摘要

Parallel processing and the methods to program, coordinate, and operate such computing systems and architectures have become a vast and highly pursued research area. These computing environments have quickly become a vital means to attack difficult compute-intensive algorithmic and heuristic problems. We present a high level description of the Execube processor. This parallel processor chip comprises eight computing engines, local memories, and a high speed message passing system on a single chip type. Chip extensibility and interconnection is a simple bulding-block approach. A class of computational models known as cellular automata (CA) is one of several that can effectively exploit Execube's parallelism. We discuss CA algorithms in general and present sample applications applicable to the Execube parallel processor.