Publication - An Introduction to the Direct Emulation of Control Structures by a Parallel Micro-Computer

Authors: Lesser, V.R
Title: An Introduction to the Direct Emulation of Control Structures by a Parallel Micro-Computer
Abstract: This paper is an investigation of the organization of a parallel micro-computer designed to emulate a variety of sequential and parallel computers. This micro-computer allows tailoring of its control structure so that is appropriate for the particular computer to be emulated. The control structure of this micro-computer is dynamically modified by changing the organization of its data structure for control. The micro-computer contains six primitive operators which dynamically manipulate and generate a tree type data structure for control. This data structure for control is used as a syntactic framework within which particular implementations of control concepts, suck as iteration, recursion, co-routines, parallelism, interrupts, etc., can be easily expressed. The major feature of the control data structure and the primitive operators are: (1) once the fixed control and data linkages among processes have been defined, they need not be rebuilt on subsequent executions of the control structure; (2) micro-programs may be written so that they execute independently of the number of physical processors present and still take advantage of available processors; (3) control structures for I/0 processes, data-accessing processes, and computational processes are expressed in a single uniform framework. An emulator programmed on this micro-computer works as am iterative two-step process similar to the process of dynamic computation or run time macro-expansion. This dynamic compilation approach to emulation differs considerably from the conventional approach to emulation, and provides a unifying approach to the emulation of a wide variety of sequential and parallel computers
Publication: IEEE Transactions on Computers- Special Issue on Micro-programming, Vol: C-20, Num: 7, pp. 751 - 763
Date: 1971
Sources: PDF: /Documents/lesser/CS-TR-71-191.pdf
Reference: Lesser, V.R. An Introduction to the Direct Emulation of Control Structures by a Parallel Micro-Computer. IEEE Transactions on Computers- Special Issue on Micro-programming, Volume C-20, Number 7, pp. 751-763. 1971.
bibtex:
@article{Lesser-281,
  author    = "V.R Lesser",
  title     = "{An Introduction to the Direct Emulation of Control
               Structures by a Parallel Micro-Computer}",
  journal   = "IEEE Transactions on Computers- Special Issue on
               Micro-programming",
  volume    = "C-20",
  number    = "7",
  pages     = "751-763",
  year      = "1971",
  url       = "http://mas.cs.umass.edu/paper/281",
}