NOCA ‑ A Notification-Oriented Computer Architecture

Abstract

Current software development processes lack techniques for the productive and quality design of software that makes efficient use of the parallel execution capabilities provided by the hardware of modern computing systems. In this context, the Notification Oriented Paradigm (NOP) has been recently developed aiming at a new organization of software logic based on notifications among causal-logical entities. NOP allows exploring the parallelization and/or distribution in a simpler and more efficient way than more commonly used programming paradigms. However, the execution dynamics under the NOP, based on notifications, is not efficiently performed by the hardware of current computing systems. This paper presents a new computer architecture, named NOCA, which is suitable for execution of software developed according to the NOP computing model. NOCA was designed in accordance with the principles of generality and scalability, which allow it to execute NOP software at any level of complexity by fetching it from a program memory. The developed architecture is organized as a fine grain multiprocessor that hierarchically executes instructions through sets of specialized processor cores. Preliminary experiments performed on this architecture show that NOCA presents improvements in terms of performance comparative evaluations.