Single Instruction, Single Data stream (SISD) A sequential computer which exploits no parallelism in either the instruction or data

streams. Single control unit (CU) fetches single Instruction Stream (IS) from memory. The CU then generates appropriate control signals to direct single processing element (PE) to operate on single Data Stream (DS) i.e. one operation at a time Examples of SISD architecture are the traditional uniprocessor machines manufactured PCs have multiple processors) or old mainframes. Single Instruction, Multiple Data streams (SIMD) A computer which exploits multiple data streams against a single instruction stream to perform operations which may be naturally parallelized. For example, an array processor or GPU. Multiple Instruction, Single Data stream (MISD) Multiple instructions operate on a single data stream. Uncommon architecture which is generally used for fault tolerance. Heterogeneous systems operate on the same data stream and must agree on the result. Examples include the Space Shuttle flight control computer. Multiple Instruction, Multiple Data streams (MIMD) Multiple autonomous processors simultaneously executing different instructions on different
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like

a PC (currently

data. Distributed systems are generally recognized to be MIMD architectures; either exploiting a single shared memory space or a distributed memory space. A multi-core superscalar processor is an MIMD processor.

SISD

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In computing, shared memory is memory that may be simultaneously accessed by multiple programs with an intent to provide communication among them or avoid redundant copies. Shared memory is an efficient means of passing data between programs. Depending on context, programs may run on a single processor or on multiple separate processors. Using memory for communication inside a single program, for example among its multiple threads, is generally not referred to as shared memory.

In computer science, distributed memory refers to a multiple-processor computer system in which each processor has its own privatememory. Computational tasks can only operate on local data, and if remote data is required, the computational task must communicate with one or more remote processors. In contrast, a shared memory multi processor offers a single memory space used by all processors. Processors do not have to be aware where data resides, except that there may be performance penalties, and that race conditions are to be avoided.