Erlangen Classification System

The Erlangen Classification System (ECS) was developed by Wolfgang Händler in 1975 and is used to describe computer architectures with regard to their parallelism . For this purpose, triples used (in square brackets are not mandatory):

tRechnertyp = (k [* k'], d [* d'], w [* w'])

Here means

• k is the number of concurrent control units (tail units)
  • k 'is the number of specialized control units for program or processor pipelining
• d the number of concurrent arithmetic units (per control unit)
  • d ' the number of pipelining arithmetic units (per control unit)
• w the number of parallel bit positions in the arithmetic unit (ALU)
  • w 'is the number of elementary sub-works

There are also the following connection operators:

• + : inhomogeneous additional units
• v : modes of operation
• x : macro pipelining.

Examples

• A i860 32-bit computer with a floating point - coprocessor and three-stage pipeline:

t _i860 = (1 * 1, 1 * 1, 32 * 3) + (0 * 0, 1 * 1, 64 * 3)

• A distributed array processor (distributed field computer) with three operating modes:

t _DAP = (1, 64, 64) v (1, 128, 32) v (1, 4096, 1)

• A 60-bit central processor with nine- fold super scalarity and 15 upstream 12-bit preprocessing units:

t _CDC7600 = (15, 1, 12) x (1, 1 * 9, 60)