Sparcle: An Evolutionary Processor Design for Large-Scale Multiprocessors

  • Authors:
  • Anant Agarwal;John Kubiatowicz;David Kranz;Beng-Hong Lim;Donald Yeung;Godfrey D'Souza;Mike Parkin

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-;-;-;-;-

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Micro
  • Year:
  • 1993

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Abstract

The design of the Sparcle chip, which incorporates mechanisms required for massively parallel systems in a Sparc RISC core, is described. Coupled with a communications and memory management chip (CMMU) Sparcle allows a fast, 14-cycle context switch, an 8-cycle user-level message send, and fine-grain full/empty-bit synchronization. Sparcle's fine-grain computation, memory latency tolerance, and efficient message interface are discussed. The implementation of Sparcle as a CPU for the Alewife machine is described.