Impulse: a high performance processing unit for multiprocessors for scientific calculation

A high-performance processing unit for multiprocessor systems for scientific calculations, called Impulse, is described. Impulse is equipped with a hardware process-control mechanism, and a powerful floating-point processor and its controller. The process-control method is based on the concurrent process model called the NC model. In the NC model, the processes and their communicating channels are static, and it is relatively easy to implement the interprocess communication server and process scheduler in hardware according to this model. To enhance the system performance, Impulse is composed of three parts, the task engine, IPC engine, and FFP engine. From the results of simulations, it appears that if IPC engine provides efficient process control even if the granularity of the processes is very fine