Arnold Blum

Advanced system design concepts facilitating silicon based VLSI chip packaging and interconnection techniques

Potentially, the silicon-based VLSI chip packaging and interconnection technology (hybrid wafer-scale integration, HWSI) provides for several thousand high-speed interconnections between individual VLSI chips, allowing an electrically homogeneous chip-boundary-transparent clustering of a tremendous amount of digital circuitry. Therefore, the abstract-structured logic-design methodology can also be efficiently used for more complex system structures, such as an entire central electronic complex of a supermini-computer, which may comprise a multitude of VLSI chips executing heterogeneous system functions. A brief introduction to an abstract-structured digital design utilizing increased intercommunication resources between functional logic modules is given, along with a description of several potential realization concepts of the silicon-based VLSI chip-interconnection technology, which provides an extraordinarily high pin count. In addition, the key aspects of the technology are outlined, and their potential use in system-level design is illustrated by several intercommunication-intensive implementation examples.<<ETX>>

Fault-tolerance in parallel architectures with crosspoint switches

Based on an existing IBM/370 switch connected parallel processor (SCPP) prototype implementation, conceptual enhancements in the design for continuous availability are described. These enhancements include the user-specifiable two- to three-fold concurrent execution of processes on nonsynchronized processing units (PUs). The output produced by these processes is compared by software or hardware means. The asynchronism of the execution allows the detection of context-dependent software failures in addition to the detection of hardware errors. These design advances encompass novel hardware and software features aimed at achieving continuous system operation as well as superior information integrity at an improved cost/performance ratio, facilitating a proven crosspoint switch intercommunication mechanism of the SCPP.<<ETX>>

Parallel structures for efficient and reliable general purpose computing

A general-purpose parallel processing structure has been prototyped facilitating an any-to-any intercommunication network for interconnecting up to 64 general-purpose processors and their memories, based on a high-speed crosspoint switch. This prototype is used for real problem processing as well as for further application software development. A short description is presented of the hardware and software implementation of this IBM-CERN parallel processing prototype.<<ETX>>