The Star network computer: a heterogeneous computing system

Abstract

An architecture for tightly coupled network computing is presented. The system was created to provide a scalable processing environment for computationally intensive applications. The system consists of a digital data switch surrounded by computing elements. The switch is composed of a back-to-back baseline multistage interconnection network, plus the ISDN protocol suite with an asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) sublayer. The key to the sources of the Star network computer is the cooperation between the application under execution and the network. Application of memory to each switch element allows the network to schedule topologies without loss of modularity, and improves system throughput significantly. The modularity of the interconnection network makes the system scalable at a low level. The Livermore test kernels were run on a network computer simulator. The worst-case communications overhead for the simulated cases was 8.5% of total run time.<>