This project is called PARALLEL: Parallel Architecture ALgorithm and LanguagE Laboratory, and is the third, and last, phase of a general upgrading of the instructional laboratories within the Department of Computer Science. This upgrading began with the establishment of lower division and upper division microcomputer laboratories in 1987 and 1989 respectively. The lower division laboratory has 20 small Macintosh computers and the upper division laboratory has 10 Macintosh II stations; these laboratories were established with grants from Apple Computer, Inc., and the National Science Foundation, and University of Arkansas money. This project provides a low-cost parallel computing system consisting of a 32 node Transputer based computer with a Macintosh II front- end. The Transputer machine has the capability of switching the interconnection schema of the nodes between any of several standard ones such as mesh, n-cube, and perfect-shuffle. Experiments are being developed to provide students with experiences in the implementation of parallel architectures tailored to favor high performance of particular algorithms such as bitonic merge sort and the fast Fourier transform.
