Design and implementation of a concurrent image processing workstation based on the Mark III hypercube

Various image processing algorithms have been implemented on the hypercube architecture and many success stories have been reported. However, the traditional approach to programming the hypercube has been to write programs which perform ;I single operation or a fixed set of operations upon data items. This approach has several drawbacks when considered for use in an interactive computing environment. First, it is difficult to process data with a sequence of sim;ple programs in the Mark III Hypercube because the Mark III software does not support sharing of data between successive programs. This means that data must be reloaded into the cube for each individual program. It also implies that programs should be fairly large and complete, to minimize the repeated downloading of large data items for multiple programs. However, the entire program must be able to fit within the hypercube node memory, which limits what a program can do by putting a restriction on its size. Furtbermore, large programs limit the amount of memory available for data, which must also be present in memory if the communications overhead is to be effectively reduced. The development of an interactive image processing workstation based on the: Mark III Hypercube requires satisfactory solutions to these and other problems.