Superposable Signalling Protocols for a Locally-Connected Scalable Parallel Computer

Scalable parallel computer architectures will require communications networks which are also scalable. The simplest, most scalable communication architecture involves only nearest neighbor and next nearest neighbor interconnection; however, it is not known to what extent such a network will prove a bottleneck for general purpose computing. Nimble proposes to develop a communications protocol for such a locally connected scalable processor which obeys an analog of the "superposition" principle of wave propagation in a linear medium. Such a superposable communications protocol should permit point-to-point interference-free communications, scale with the size of the processor, and degrade gracefully in latency and bandwidth with increasing congestion. A superposable messaging protocol should also make better use of the available computational resources than a fixed partitioning of the resources into computation and communication components.