The integration of SIMD and MIMD: A new line of development for MPP systems

A close coupling of an SIMD engine with an MIMD architecture appears to be a promising new area of development of massively parallel processors. On the one hand, the high computational efficacy of the SIMD machines should be preserved in future MPP developments; on the other, the flexibility of the MIMD approach should foster novel applications of MPP. The authors intend to discuss the hurdles that arise in closely integrating two such architectures, while at the same time presenting, with examples from some application fields, the features and functionalities that make this evolution such an interesting opportunity.