APPARATUS AND METHOD FOR EFFICIENT PARALLEL COMPUTATION

摘要

The present invention provides a computing unit for operating in a parallel computing system, the computing unit comprising a plurality of processing elements and an interface for connecting the computing unit to other components of the computing system wherein each processing element has a nominal maximum processing rate NPR and each processing element includes a respective memory unit such that data can be transferred from the memory unit at a predetermined maximum data rate MBW and the interface provides a maximum data transfer rate CBW, wherein in order to provide a predetermined peak calculation performance for the computing unit PP obtainable by a number n processing elements operating at the nominal maximum processing rate such that PP=n×NPR operations per second, the computing unit includes an integer multiple f times n processing elements wherein f is greater than one and each processing element is limited to operate at a processing rate of NPR/f.