Decentralized dynamic resource management support for massively parallel processor arrays

This paper presents a hardware-supported resource management methodology for massively parallel processor arrays. It enables processing elements to autonomously explore resource availability in their neighborhood. To support resource exploration, we introduce specialized controllers, which can be attached to each of the processing elements. We propose different types of architectures for the exploration controller: fast FSM-based designs as well as flexible programmable controllers. These controllers allow to implement different distributed resource exploration strategies in order to enable parallel programs the exploration and reservation of available resources according to different application requirements. Hardware cost evaluations show that the cost of the simplest implementation of our programmable controller is comparable to our FSM-based implementations, while offering the flexibility for implementing different exploration strategies. We show that the proposed distributed approach can achieve a significant speedup in comparison with centralized resource exploration methods.