Abstract

This paper describes a portable implementation of the Graph Reduction in Parallel (GRIP) software, built on the Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) process control system. Using this system, it is easy for anyone to "get a GRIP" without needing to invest in special-purpose hardware. An important contribution of this paper is its detailed description of GRIP's Intelligent Memory Unit (IMU) software. 1 Introduction GRIP Architecture GRIP is a "shared-memory" multiprocessor built from off-the-shelf components, first described by Peyton Jones et al [PCSH87]. The GRIP machine comprises a number of Processing Elements (PEs) and Intelligent Memory Units (IMUs) linked by a 2-level bus structure. The communications system is a hardware implementation of a packetswitched message system with guaranteed delivery and which preserves packet order between 2 components. The communications network is relatively high-bandwidth (20MB/s and 100MB/s) and has low latency (~10µs for a round-trip, including softwa...

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