Survey of Parallel Computation

Hardware Implementations

•The idea of switching to execute instructions from another thread when memory latency stalls processor has been around a long time

•Early Honeywell machines used related ideas

•Denelcor HEP (~1982) designed by Burton Smith had 8 threads “in the air” at once

•The 1990s saw several efforts to build such machines

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•We will study two designs

•Alewife from Anant Agarwal’s group at MIT

•The Tera Computer from Burton Smith