Architectural support for the efficient generation of code for horizontal architectures
B. Ramakrishna Rau, C. D. Glaeser, E. M. Greenawalt · 1982
Horizontal architectures, such as the CDC Advanced Flexible Processor [I] and the FPS APi20-B [2}, consist of a number of resources that can operate in parallel, each of which is controlled by a field in the wide instruction word. Such architectures have been developed to perform high speed scientific computations at a modest cost: Figure 1 displays those characteristics of horizontal architectures that are germane to the issues discussed in this paper. The simultaneous requirements of high performance and low cost lead to an architecture consisting of multiple pipelined processing elements (PEs) such as adders and multipliers, a memory (which for scheduling purposes may be viewed as yet another PE with two operations: a READ and a WRITE), and an interconnect which ties them all together. The interconnect allows the result of one operation to be directly routed to another PE as one of the inputs for an operation that is to be performed there. The required memory bandwidth is reduced since temporary values need not be written to and read from the memory. The final aspect of horizontal processors that is of interest is that their program memories emit wide instructions which synchronously specify the actions of the multiple and possibly dissimilar PEs. The program memory is sequenced by a conventional sequencer that assumes sequential flow of control unless a branch is explicitly specified.