Communications of the ACM
Coordination of computation in a binary tree of processors: an architectural proposal
Coordination of computation in a binary tree of processors: an architectural proposal
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The computer architecture described here was inspired by Magó's recently proposed cellular computer [1979] based on the Formal Functional Programming (FFP) languages introduced by Backus [1978]. Magó's machine is a binary tree of many simple processor/memory units, called cells. FFP programs are stored, one symbol per cell, in the leaf cells (“L” cells) of the machine. The machine fully exploits all the parallelism expressed in an FFP program, storage space permitting. It can, furthermore, execute many programs simultaneously, and it can perform in parallel many operations below the level expressed in the program, since a single “primitive” FFP operation may be composed of more basic machine operations that can be executed in parallel. Magó's work brings to light the interesting possibilities of a binary tree of processors operating on individual symbols of an FFP expression.