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Abstract

A new form of parallelism, distributed bit-parallelism, is introduced. A distributed bit-parallel organization distributes each bit of a data item to a different processor. Bit-parallelism allows computation that is sub-linear with word size for such operations as integer addition, arithmetic shifts, and data moves. The implications of bit-parallelism for system architecture are analyzed. An implementation of a bit-parallel architecture based on a mesh with bypass network is presented. The performance of bit-parallel algorithms on this architecture is analyzed and found to be several times faster than bit-serial algorithms. The application of the architecture to low level vision algorithms is discussed.