The Versatile Image Processor V. I. P. (Hardware Design)

This paper presentv the architecture of a medium-grain parallel processor well suited for image analysis. The processor, named V.I.P. is composed by clusters of 4 Intel i860 RlSC processors connected among themselves and to I/O units through a parallel bus in the industrial standard VME, a parallel custom Video Rus and a serial network. The processors operate concurrently on cluster and system shared memories through the parallel busses and exchange messages among crates and with a host system through the serial network. Modularity and alternative path availability allow to tailor the system to the problem; video bus high bandwidth and computational modules processing power allow very low processing time; usage of general purpose processors and of simple contention control routines make easy programming the machine. Details of the architecture and of the prototype performance are given.