T: A Multithreaded Massively Parallel Architecture

What should the architecture of each node in a general purpose, massively parallel architecture (MPA) be? We frame the question in concrete terms by describing two fundamental problems that must be solved well in any general purpose MPA. From this, we systematically develop the required logical organization of an MPA node, and present some details of *T (pronounced Start), a concrete architecture designed to these requirements. *T is a direct descendant of dynamic dataflow architectures, and unifies them with von Neumann architectures. We discuss a hand-compiled example and some compilation issues.