SPACE: Symbolic Processing in Associative Computing Elements

SPACE chip

SPACE board

The SPACE chip implements 148 x 36-bit Content Addressable Parallel Processors (CAPPs). In the PADMAVATI prototype system, a hierarchy of packaging technologies cascade multiple SPACE chips to form a 170,496 processor array with a total storage of 6 Mb.

Primary applications for SPACE are AI algorithms that require fast searching and processing within large, rapidly changing data structures. The PADMAVATI prototype has a peak performance of 136 billion 32-bit comparisons per second when the CAPPs are driven by transputers. The existing CAPP modules could provide a throughput of over 1 Tera comparisons per second with a dedicated microcontroller design. Primitive parallel search and write instructions can be composed into arbitrarily complex arithmetic and logical operations, allowing SPACE to be used as a powerful SIMD processor.

A paper presented at the 3rd International Workshop on VLSI for Neural Networks and Artificial Intelligence, Oxford, 1992, describes the machine in detail. This is a PostScript file, and this is HTML generated automatically from the TeX source.

Krste Asanovic