Design and Programming of Reconfigurable Mesh Based Many-cores

Book excerpt: The paradigm shift towards many-core parallelism is accompanied by two fundamental questions: how should the many processors on a single die communicate to each other and what are suitable programming models for these novel architectures? In this thesis, the author tackles both questions by reviewing the reconfigurable mesh model of massively parallel computation for many-cores. The book presents the design, implementation and evaluation of a many-core architecture that is based on the execution principles and communication infrastructure of the reconfigurable mesh. This work fundamentally rests on FPGA implementations and shows that reconfigurable mesh processors with hundreds of autonomous cores are feasible. Several case studies demonstrate the effectiveness of programming and illustrate why the reconfigurable mesh is a promising model for many-cores.