Design of An Integrated Parallel Processing System with Systolic VLSI Chips

The design of a massively parallel processing system IPU (Integrated Parallel Processing Unit) is described in this paper. It is a two-dimensional mesh-connected parallel proccesing array operated in an SIMD fashion. The current version of the IPU array is implemented with 64 systolic VLSI chips, each of which consists of 4 processing elements (PEs). Each PE consists of a 4-bit ALU, a 64* 4-bit RAM, several 4-bit registers and some multiplexers. Four PEs are implanted in a VLSI systolic chip using 2 micron CMOS technology. The IPU Department System that acts as a bridge between the host computer and the IPU array is also designed. We provide a high-level parallel programming environment for conveniently designing parallel programs for this IPU array. Some experimental results show that the performance of the IPU system is more than one hundred times faster than that of the host computer.