Design, Construction and Installation of Data Manipulator.
W W Gaertner, Lee,D T W, CHARLES T. RETTER, Inderpal Singh · Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC) · 1977
It is by now well recognized that most parallel processing systems require a versatile communication facility to pass data (a) between the different processing elements, (b) between and processing elements as a group and the memory modules and (c) between the input/output devices and memory and/or processing elements. This communication capbility is used to exchange data (such as interim results) between processing elements, to rearrange data in memory, and even to rearrange bits within the same parallel word. The term Data Manipulation has been introduced to define this function which must be considered a computer-system building block of equal importance to the processing element array, the high speed memory, the mass storage and the system control. Surprisingly, this fact has not been recognized adequately in the design of several existing parallel-processor systems, with the result that the execution of many important algorithms is slowed down significantly. This report describes the design, construction, installation and performance of a Data Manipulator which, while integrated specifically into a STARAN computer system, is applicable to any other parallel computer architecture.