Content area
Two vital factors in a multiprocessor computing system are: 1. the interprocessor communication scheme, and 2. the utilization of processors. Interprocessor communication is facilitated by using transputers. One way of overcoming the limitation of a transputer in terms of having only 4 physical links is by using a basic module consisting of a 3-dimensional cube with a network controller (NC). The Extended Hypercube (EH) is a transputer-based multiprocessor architecture that employs NCs to handle communications tasks. The use of the NCs reduces the communication burden on the processor elements, thereby improving the computation to communication ratio. A scheme is proposed for implementing the EH architecture using INMOS transputers as the processor and controller elements. The performance of the EH is analyzed for a particular class of problems that are very well suited to this architecture, namely, those involving single node/multinode broadcast and total exchange.