The architecture of closely-coupled distributed computers and their language processors
James L. Frankel · 1983
Designing a closely-coupled distributed computer system would create an environment that is easily expandable, eliminate the high communication costs of a loosely-coupled system, and provide a great deal of power at a low cost. Since the software and hardware architectures do not currently exist to allow this kind of system to be built, this dissertation will explore a unified view of hardware and software and present one solution. The first portion of this dissertation develops a method for organizing a system of processors with shared memory that takes into account dynamic load balancing across the processors, robustness, and reliability. Emphasis is given to the design of the network, placement of input/output devices, and caching techniques. Next, a technique for implementing language processors (compilers and assemblers) that will run on the closely-coupled distributed system is discussed. The basis of this technique is to process in parallel various syntactic structures of the language to be compiled. In this way, the system resembles a data flow computer in which the granularity of the data is very large. In addition, techniques for the production of a compiler that analyzes the data flow of a program written in a conventional language, that produces a data flow graph representing that program, and that partitions the graph for execution on a multiprocessor system are developed. The final part of this dissertation will describe a distributed implementation of a Pascal compiler on a local network of personal computers. This prototype demonstrates the feasibility of this approach to distributed processing.