A mechanism for SIMD execution of SPMD programs

Although the SIMD machine is appreciated because of its simple structure leading to the aptness for integration in a VLSI chip, the programming paradigm applicable for this machine is rather poor. If the SPMD program, which is widely used in the MIMD machine, is efficiently executed on the SIMD machine, the versatility of this machine will be very much improved. The key problem of executing a SPMD program on a SIMD machine is the handling of branch instructions and barrier synchronization. To resolve this problem a new branching mechanism which includes the instruction address broadcast, the target address register and the active flag in the processing element, is proposed. The effectiveness of this mechanism is discussed on example programs