The Execube parallel processor chip and cellular automata for tactical route planning

Abstract

Parallel processing and the methods to program, coordinate, and operate such computing systems and architectures have become a vast and highly pursued research area. These computing environments have quickly become a vital means to attack difficult compute-intensive algorithmic and heuristic problems. We present a high level description of the Execube processor. This parallel processor chip comprises eight computing engines, local memories, and a high speed message passing system on a single chip type. Chip extensibility and interconnection is a simple building-block approach. A class of computational models known as cellular automata (CA) is one of several that can effectively exploit Execube`s parallelism. We discuss CA algorithms in general and present sample applications applicable to the Execube parallel processor.