1982 Reports

Programming the DADO Machine: An Introduction to PPL/M

Stolfo, Salvatore; Miranker, Daniel P.; Shaw, David Elliot

DADO (Stolfo and Shaw, 1982) is a highly parallel, tree-structured machine designed to provide significant performance improvements in the execution of Artificial Intelligence software. The DADO prototype, currently being constructed at Columbia University, comprises 1023 processing elements (PE's) each consisting of an Intel 8751 microcomputer chip and an Intel 2186 8K by 8 RAM chip. The PE's are interconnected in a complete binary tree. A full version of DADO would comprise on the order of a hundred thousand PE's each consisting ot a much smaller amount ot local memory, roughly 2K bytes of RAM. (The 8K RAM employed in the DADO prototype was chosen to allow a modest amount of flexibility in designing and implementing the software base for the full version of DADO.) In addition, a specialized combinatorial I/O switch is incorporated in the full DADO design to perform the most basic communication primitives at much higher speeds than is possible with sequential logic, as it is implemented on the prototype machine.