Local-area multiprocessor: surpassing clusters

Abstract

Clusters, or networks, of workstations (NOW) have proven their value for certain classes of applications, those that can be efficiently parallelized with coarse granularity requiring relatively little intertask communication. However clusters of workstations have been ineffective for those classes of applications that require fine-grained parallelization or too much intertask communication, because of the high overhead and poor performance of present communication mechanisms. A new international standard reduces this cost by several orders of magnitude compared to present networks or proposed future networks/channels like FibreChannel or ATM. This new technology implements a "Local-Area Multiprocessor" with very high performance message passing and distributed shared memory.