Completely decentralised communication control in microcomputer clusters

Very closely located single-board or single-chip microcomputers, co-operating for a common task, can be linked as clusters, with their sizes being changed arbitrarily depending on the task parallelism and the resources available from each node (microcomputer). Intracluster communications are handled by identical bus/memory arbiters, one in each node. The arbiters switch microprocessors and memories in the same or different nodes to different sides of communication paths. Node-to-node data transfer is fully interlocked, and the performance of each cluster can be predicted with very good accuracy when the number of co-operating nodes and the fractional external memory accesses are known.