Abstract
Weak parallel machines represent a new class of physically feasible parallel machine models whose prominent representative is the so-called Parallel Turing Machine (PTM) as introduced by the author in 1984. Except PTMs, further members of this class are e.g. various kinds of systolic machines, cellular automata, orthogonal iterative arrays, etc. From the computational point of view the main common feature of weak parallel machines is their ability to perform pipelined computations efficiently, what is used in characterizing the corresponding machine class by so—called Pipelined Computation Thesis. This thesis states that on these machines the period of computation is polynomially related to the space of sequential Turing machine computations.
The paper gives a brief overview of the most important known results concerning PTMs and extends them by new results stressing the significance of PTMs in the context of physically feasible parallel computations.
This research was partly supported by Cooperative Action IC 1000 (Project ”ALTEC”) of the European Communities
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© 1992 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Wiedermann, J. (1992). Weak parallel machines: A new class of physically feasible parallel machine models. In: Havel, I.M., Koubek, V. (eds) Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science 1992. MFCS 1992. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 629. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg . https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-55808-X_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-55808-X_9
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