IXM2: a parallel associative processor

This paper describes a parallel associative processor, lXM2, developed mainly for semantic network processing. IXM2 consists of 64 associative processors and 9 network processors, having a total of 256K words of associative memory. The large associative memory enables 65,536 semantic network nodes to be processed in parallel and reduces the order of algorithmic complexity to O( 1) in,basic semantic net operations. It is shown that IXM2 has computing power comparable to that of a Connection Machine. Programming for lXM2 is performed with the knowledge representation language IXL, a superset of Prolog, so that IXM2 can be utilized as a back-end to AI workstations.