Virtual supercomputer

A virtual supercomputer apparatus, comprising:

• a reconfigurable virtual machine (processor), having its own instruction set, and operating on an underlying physical hardware processor;
• or a local or distributed network of such virtual machines;
• where the virtual machine architecture is designed to handle the class of problems having a solution describable in terms of nodes,
• where a node comprises an index word and a data word, and
• where each node represents one or more data structures such as:
• numeric tags, character tags, boolean flags, numeric values, character values, objects IDs, database-record IDs, simple arrays, variable-density multidimensional arrays, symbolic functions, mathematical functions, connection pointers to other nodes, function pointers, lookup-table list pointers, linked-lists, or even pointers to other solution spaces or data representations;
• and
• where nodes are interconnected in any topology, such as:
• independent point-clouds, ordered sets of points, acyclic graphs, cyclic graphs, balanced trees, recombining graphs, meshes, lattices, and various hybrids or combinations of such representations;
• and where a virtual machine includes virtual hardware units to:
• configure nodes and virtual processor architecture,
• including register structures, node data structures, arithmetic modes, and memory schemes;
• and units to
• create (that is, instantiate) nodes, compute results for (that is, populate) nodes, move among (that is, navigate) nodes, and alter (that is, evolve) nodes and their interconnections;
• and a unit to
• provide highly-optimized function evaluation and fixed-point integer arithmetic, with application-selectable precision;
• and a unit to
• manage the distribution of data and processes to networked machines.