Motorola Inc wants to be at the forefront of the looming parallel processing revolution and it reported yesterday that it has delivered the first prototype of Monsoon, a general-purpose, dynamic dataflow computer to Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Monsoon was constructed as a prototype to demonstrate practical scalability and programmability, the aim being that the same program should run on one or on hundreds or thousands of processors without any modification and with improved performance, and a key to this on the Monsoon is a new implicitly parallel programming language called Id. Monsoon consists of eight 64-bit processing elements and eight 32Mb memory elements interconnected by a fast packet network. Each processing element is capable of processing up to 10m dataflow tokens per second, while the memory elements can process 4.17m split-phase transactions per second. Four Delta Series Unix computers are used as the front-end computers. According to Professor Greg Papadopoulos, chief architect, Laboratory for Computer Science at the Institute, With improved hardware, for example, 1995 solid state technology, Monsoon descendents with 1,000 processors should be able to reach performance levels of over one TIPS – Tera Instructions Per Second. The project is a joint research effort between MIT and Motorola Computer Group’s Cambridge Research Centre and Advanced Technology Laboratory. The $10m Motorola effort is jointly funded by the company, MIT and the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Other Monsoon col laborators include Los Alamos Nati onal Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratory, University of California at Berkeley, University of Glasgow and the State University of Rutgers.
