The function of a connection network between hosts and processing elements in massively parallel computer systems

The authors examine the function of a connection network between massive numbers of processing elements (PEs) and a single host by comparing the data structure machine (DSM), whose major connection network is a computationally powerful binary tree with the host connected at the root, and the Connection Machine (CM), which provides a very rich and general PE-to-PE connection network, but whose connection to the host is little more than a buffered wire. The binary tree network used in the DSM can be utilized to achieve asymptotic improvements in speed for algorithms that maintain, locate, the utilize data parallelism in data structures that can be characterized by a high degree of locality