Impact of Reconfigurable Function on Meshes with Row/Column Buses

Abstract

This paper studies the difference in computational power between the mesh-connected parallel computers equipped with dynamically reconfigurable bus systems and those with static ones. The mesh with separable buses (MSB) is the mesh-connected computer with dynamically reconfigurable row/column buses. The broadcasting buses of the MSB can be dynamically sectioned into smaller bus segments by program control. We examine the impact of reconfigurable capability on the computational power of the MSB model, and investigate how computing power of the MSB decreases when we deprive the MSB of its reconfigurability. We show that any single step of the MSB of size n×n can be simulated in O(log n) time by the MSB without its reconfigurable function, which means that the MSB of size n×n can work withO(log n) step slowdown even if its dynamic reconfigurable function is disabled.