Image processing PCI-based shared memory architecture design

The object of the GFLOPS project was to study all aspects concerning the design of a low cost parallel architecture. The project's aim was to develop a parallel architecture as well as its software environment to implement image processing applications efficiently. The proposed architecture supports up to 512 processor nodes, which are PC mother boards, connected over a scalable and cost-effective network, via the PCI-bus, at a constant cost per node. The aim is to obtain at low cost a scalable virtually shared memory machine with a physically distributed architecture. The authors present the design of the GFLOPS machine and evaluate the effectiveness of the mechanisms incorporated. The analysis of the architecture's behavior was conducted with image processing algorithms, written in C. A development environment, especially a C data-parallel language, has been built for this purpose.