Sharing special purpose resources in a multiprocessor environment (Q922678)

The paper is concerned with sharing special purpose resources (SPRs) within a multiprocessor architecture, through a resource arbitration interconnection network (RAIN). The network consists of a set of data and control buses to which processors and SPRs are connected by bus interface units and resource cluster controllers. It is worth mentioning that two ways of handling rejected requests were analyzed (resubmission model and modified splitting model). The RAIN is simulated under various operation conditions, using four performance measurements: network pass rate, the mean delay, the mean resource/bus utilization.