A Dualistic Model To Describe Computer Architectures
Peter Nitezki, Michael Engel · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1985
The Dualistic Model for Computer Architecture Description uses a hierarchy of abstraction levels to describe a computer in arbitrary steps of refinement from the top of the user interface to the bottom of the gate level. In our Dualistic Model the description of an architecture may be divided into two major parts called "Concept" and "Realization". The Concept of an architecture on each level of the hierarchy is an Abstract Data Type that describes the functionality of the computer and an implementation of that data type relative to the data type of the next lower level of abstraction. The Realization on each level comprises a language describing the means of user interaction with the machine, and a processor interpreting this language in terms of the language of the lower level. The surface of each hierarchical level, the data type and the language express the behaviour of a ma-chine at this level, whereas the implementation and the processor describe the structure of the algorithms and the system. In this model the Principle of Operation maps the object and computational structure of the Concept onto the structures of the Realization. Describing a system in terms of the Dualistic Model is therefore a process of refinement starting at a mere description of behaviour and ending at a description of structure. This model has proven to be a very valuable tool in exploiting the parallelism in a problem and it is very transparent in discovering the points where par-allelism is lost in a special architecture. It has successfully been used in a project on a survey of Computer Architecture for Image Processing and Pattern Analysis in Germany.