Interconnection networks: dimensions in design

Abstract

The interconnection network is the switching fabric responsible for providing communication between all processors in a parallel computer. Much research has been directed towards developing superior interconnection networks, but there is no general agreement that this problem is solved. The speakers for this panel session were asked to address the following question: for a given range of number of commodity high-performance processors (e.g. 256 to 1024) what interconnection network should be used to build a general purpose MIMD parallel machine.