A Restructurable Computer System

This paper presents an architecture for a restructurable computer system which reconfigures its resources according to the problem environment for efficient performance. It converts the user's program into an intermediate level language called Realist which is capable of specifying arbitrary resource structures such as an array or a pipeline and the computation to be performed upon these structures. An architectural design for the system is presented with special attention to bus units. It is shown how APL, a vector processing language, can be implemented on the system. Some storage schemes are considered for organizing vectors and matrices to facilitate efficient retrieval and manipulation. The paper is concluded with a comparison of the proposed system to existing high speed architectures.