It is thought that fast low cost computers can be built by employing large numbers of cheap microprocessors working together in a system. However increasing the number of microprocessors in a parallel computer system may not produce a linear increase in performance for general purpose programming. The problems seem to lie in the communication between processors and the method of exploiting parallelism. A multiprocessor system was constructed using six MC68000 microprocessors. The problems of communication and exploiting parallelism were tackled in the design of the multiprocessor system. The component processors in a multiprocessor system communicate with each other through a communication channel. It is essential that the communication hardware has a high bandwidth. A fast communication hardware was implemented based on a two port shared memory. One method of extracting parallelism in a computing problem is by using divide and conquer. A software system was developed that enables the multiprocessor to exploit parallelism derived by the divide and conquer method. A software kernel is employed to manage the scheduling of parallel tasks to processors and the communication between processors. The mode of computation is based on the demand driven model.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:352834 |
| Date | January 1985 |
| Creators | Bakti, Zulkifli Abdul Kadir |
| Publisher | University of Bath |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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