Multiprocessor reconfiguration techniques

The authors provide a summary of recent approaches to designing reconfigurable multiprocessor architectures. It is suggested that it has become evident that multiprocessor architectures based on static interconnection topologies are clearly limited in the range of computations that they can efficiently support. Two classes of reconfiguration techniques can be identified that enable multiprocessor architectures to adapt to the varying computational requirements that are encountered in applications such as image processing, i.e. system level reconfiguration and resource level reconfiguration. Highly structured, synchronous computations tend to be amenable to static reconfiguration techniques, while the more unstructured computations require techniques, both at the system level and processing-element level, that can adapt to run-time reconfiguration requests