AT&T - 3D DSP

 

AT&T Bell Laboratories with support from DARPA has produced a multi-GFLOP parallel machine which is applicable to a variety of signal processing and pattern recognition problems using 3D MCM technology  [37]. Every MCM has 362 I/O ports, 274 are wire bonded, while the remaining I/O ports are used during testing of the individual MCMs. The area reduction as a result of just using the MCM technology, over conventional discrete packaging, is about seven times. The machine is specifically targeted at applications that require high throughput and processing speed through parallelism. The important features of the DSP3 multiprocessor are:

• The use of the AT&T DSP32C, a 25 MFLOP, 32 bit floating point processing engine at each node.
• The availability of up to 1 Mbyte of high speed SRAM at each processing node.
• External and internal I/O rates of up to 40 Mbytes/s.
• A scalable interconnect architecture, which is capable of:
  • linking up to 128 processing nodes in a 4-connected lattice to achieve a peak throughput rate of 3.2 GFLOPS;
  • providing modularity and scalability to permit machine configurations as small as 16 nodes (400 MFLOP) with a higher throughput available in 400 MFLOP increments;
  • supporting a machine configuration topology that is most efficient for the specific applications, such as linear mesh, linear systolic, binary;
  • achieving reconfiguration fault tolerance by isolating and routing around faulty processing nodes;
• A high level language development environment that includes an extensive and growing library of signal processing subroutines.

The volume of the designed system is 225 in . The actual processing core is 35 in , while the rest is used as part of the cooling system. Unfortunately, there is no data available on system weight.