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

Authors: Lesser, Victor
Title: An Introduction to the Direct Emulation of Control Structure by a Parallel Micro-Computer
Abstract: This paper is an investigation of the organization of a parallel micro-computer designed to emulate a wide variety of sequential and parallel computers. This micro-computer allows tailoring of its control structure so that it 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, such as iteration, recursion, co-routines, parallelism, interrupts, etc., can be easily expressed. The major features of the control data structure and the primitive operators are: (1) once the fixed control and data linkages among micro-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 a dvantage of available processors; (3) control structures for I/O processes, data-accessing processes, and computational processes are expressed in a single uniform framework. An emulator programmed on this micro-computer works as an iterative two-step process similar to the process of dynamic compilation or run time macro-expansion. This data structure 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: Stanford Linear Accelerator Center Technical Report SLAC-PUB-904
Location: Stanford, CA
Date: March 1971
Sources: PDF: /Documents/lesser/Lesser_SLAC_Dec70.pdf
Reference: Lesser, Victor. An Introduction to the Direct Emulation of Control Structure by a Parallel Micro-Computer. Stanford Linear Accelerator Center Technical Report SLAC-PUB-904. March 1971.
bibtex: 
@techreport{Lesser-416,
  author    = "Victor Lesser",
  title     = "{An Introduction to the Direct Emulation of Control
               Structure by a Parallel Micro-Computer}",
  month     = "March",
  year      = "1971",
  address   = "Stanford, CA",
  url       = "http://mas.cs.umass.edu/paper/416",
}