Modified-mesh connected parallel computers

The author explores modifications of a mesh-connected parallel computer for the purpose of increasing the efficiency of executing important application programs. These modifications are made by adding one or more global mesh structures to the processing array. The author shows how his modifications allow asymptotic improvements in the efficiency of executing computations having low to medium interprocessor communication requirements (e.g. tree computations, prefix computations, or finding the connected components of a graph). For computations with high interprocessor communication requirements such as sorting, the author shows that they offer no speedup. He also compares the modified mesh-connected parallel computer to other similar organization including the pyramid, the X-tree, and the mesh-of-trees