Organization of a distributed computer system based on the CITO communication technique

The requirements in numerous fields of science and technology are rapidly exceeding the capabilities of serial computers and highlight the need for efficient parallel processing organizations. Improvements in speed are dependent on the development of highly parallel algorithms and new advancements in computer architectures. This study proposes a parallel architecture which has the structural characteristics necessary for efficient execution of concurrent information processing. The architecture presented in this dissertation is based on a time-multiplexed communications structure with a hierarchical organization of nodes. Each node contains a processing unit and a network communications module. Network communications use the Content Induced Transaction Overlap (CITO) protocol which lexicographically orders data items among distributed senders on a multi-access channel. This technique has been extended to allow virtual communications and logical full connectivity in a massively parallel system. The proposed organization was shown to be useful for passing messages, synchronizing processes, and supporting basic operating systems functions in a distributed environment. The utility of the architecture was demonstrated for two types of applications. The first application, memory-based reasoning, uses the CITO property of lexicographical ordering of information. With this approach, problems are solved by directly referencing the system's database to determine the similarity of a given hypothesis to prior knowledge. In the second application, real-time control, the architecture provides an essential capacity for incremental growth of the system. The unique feature of the proposed architecture to resolve simultaneous priority interrupts can meet the requirements to improve a timely system response tin a dynamically changing environment.