A reconfigurable network interface called RHiNET-2/NI0 is developed for parallel processing of PCs distributed within one or more floors of a building. Two configurations: the HS (High Speed) configuration with only a high-speed primitive and the DSM (Distributed Shared Memory) configuration which supports sophisticated primitives can be selected by the network requirement. From the empirical evaluation, it appears that the HS configuration markedly improves the latency of data transfer compared with traditional network interfaces. On the other hand, the DSM configuration executes sophisticated primitives for distributed shared memory more than twice as fast as that of software implementation.

WASMII is a virtual hardware system that executes dataflow algorithms using a dynamically reconfigurable multi-context device with a data driven control mechanism. Although the effectiveness of the system has been evaluated through simulations and using an emulator, implementation of WASMII was infeasible due to the unavailability of such a device. However, the first prototype of a practical dynamically reconfigurable multi-context device called DRL has been developed by NEC, and we developed a reconfigurable test bed using four sample DRL chips. On this board, we have implemented and executed some simple applications of WASMII mechanism. Evaluation results show that the performance of the parallel implementation of WASMII is almost twice as that of a PC with a CPU based on the corresponding technology.