Tera Multithreaded Supercomputer
This uses a clever idea developed over many years by Burton Smith who originally used it in the Denelcor system which was one of the first MIMD machines over 15 years ago
MTA(multithreaded architectures) are designed to hide the different access times of memory and CPU cycle time.
- We used caches in conventional architectures
- MTA uses a strategy that is typically used with coarser grain functional parallelism -- namely it switches to another task while current one is waiting for memory
- Burtom emphasizes that hiding memory latency always implicitly requires parallelism equal to ratio of memory access to CPU operation speed