Distributed synchronization on a parallel machine with a logic layer

ArMen is a MIMD machine whose nodes are built with a standard processor tightly connected to a FPGA. Two levels of communication can be distinguished. The first one has a high throughput and computing capabilities, and is built with a ring of FPGAs connected one to the other by a 32-bit data path. This logic layer forms an active communication ring, denoted LL. The second one is composed of the primary communication network of the MIMD machine. Current parallel machines do not offer specific support for computing and delivering critical synchronization information in a set or a subset of machine nodes. Exploiting a new growing technology, the proposed architecture gives this possibility and we show some ways of implementing a synchronization barrier, also called a strong synchronizer. We can extend the proposition to compute different functions on distributed values. Distributed and parallel simulation is the main application area currently being studied, but implementation of genetic algorithms and of data-parallel languages is also considered