  The paper describes the new computers architecture, the main features of
which has been claimed in the Russian Federation patent 2312388 and in the US
patent application 11/991331. This architecture is intended to effective
support of the General Purpose Parallel Computing (GPPC), the essence of which
is extremely frequent switching of threads between states of activity and
states of viewed in the paper the algorithmic latency. To emphasize the same
impact of the architectural latency and the algorithmic latency upon GPPC, is
introduced the new notion of the generalized latency and is defined its
quantitative measure - the Generalized Latency Tolerance (GLT). It is shown
that a well suited for GPPC implementation architecture should have high level
of GLT and is described such architecture, which is called the Virtual-Threaded
Machine. This architecture originates a processor virtualization in the
direction of activities virtualization, which is orthogonal to the well-known
direction of memory virtualization. The key elements of the architecture are 1)
the distributed fine grain representation of the architectural register file,
which elements are hardware swapped through levels of a microarchitectural
memory, 2) the prioritized fine grain direct hardware multiprogramming, 3) the
access controlled virtual addressing and 4) the hardware driven semaphores. The
composition of these features lets to introduce new styles of operating system
(OS) programming, which is free of interruptions, and of applied programming
with a very rare using the OS services.
