The evolution of technology provides the opportunity of forming large processor ensembles working closely together. When decomposing application programs and assigning subtasks to different processors we expect not only high throughput, but also the fastest possible execution of each individual demand. The level of performance in these areas is strongly influenced by the hardware interconnection structure and by the communication software.

The contemporary general purpose computer of the Princeton type is limited in its performance by the speed of the available logic families. Many projects around the world try to achieve higher performance by using many processors connected via common memories. The hardware costs for the interconnection of many processors and memories has to be limited and a severe degradation resulting from memory access conflicts must be avoided. The EGPA-project uses the concept of restricted neighbourhoods to solve these problems. The processors and memories are arranged in a freely extensible cellular structure. The number of connections to processors and to memories are limited for all sizes of the array. In this paper we present measured results from the pilot system, which show whether memory conflicts will influence the speed of the individual processors. The results will be valid for larger arrays, too.