The iPSC/2 direct-connect communications technology
Steven F. Nugent · 1988
This paper describes the hardware architecture and protocol of the message routing system used in the iPSC®/2 concurrent computer. The Direct-Connect router was developed by Intel Scientific Computers to replace the store-and-forward message passing mechanism used in the original iPSC system. The router enhances the performance of the iPSC/2 system by reducing the message passing latency, increasing the node-to-node channel bandwidth and allowing simultaneous bi-directional message traffic between any two nodes. The new communication system has nearly equal performance between any pair of processing nodes, making the network topology more transparent to the user.