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BLOB computing

Published: 14 April 2004 Publication History

Abstract

Current processor and multiprocessor architectures are almost all based on the Von Neumann paradigm. Based on this paradigm, one can build a general-purpose computer using very few transistors, e.g., 2250 transistors in the first Intel 4004 microprocessor. In other terms, the notion that on-chip space is a scarce resource is at the root of this paradigm which trades on-chip space for program execution time. Today, technology considerably relaxed this space constraint. Still, few research works question this paradigm as the most adequate basis for high-performance computers, even though the paradigm was not initially designed to scale with technology and space.In this article, we propose a different computing model, defining both an architecture and a language, that is intrinsically designed to exploit space; we then investigate the implementation issues of a computer based on this model, and we provide simulation results for small programs and a simplified architecture as a first proof of concept. Through this model, we also want to outline that revisiting some of the principles of today's computing paradigm has the potential of overcoming major limitations of current architectures.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CF '04: Proceedings of the 1st conference on Computing frontiers
April 2004
522 pages
ISBN:1581137419
DOI:10.1145/977091
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 14 April 2004

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Author Tags

  1. bio-inspiration
  2. cellular automata
  3. scalable architectures

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