A design is disclosed for a cellular computer consisting of many processors, of two kinds, connected in the form of a tree. The computer is intended for the highly parallel execution of programs written in an applicative programming language. The program is stored in the leaf cells of the tree. The computer uses the syntactic structure of the program to guide the embedding of a network of "syntactic nodes" in the tree of machine cells, and execution of the program is accomplished through operations performed by the embedded network of nodes. This computer can execute many user programs simultaneously, it can take advantage of all the parallelism expressed in each user program (storage space permitting), and it can perform in parallel many operations below the level expressed in the user programs.
展开▼