A Survey and Comparision of Fault-Tolerant Multistage Interconnection Networks
Adams, Agrawal, Siegel · Computer · 1987
Today all branches of engineering and a multitude of other disciplines rely firmly and increasingly on computational support. However, each discipline has important problems that, to be solved feasibly, await our ability to field computers with orders of magnitude greater performance than currently available. Consequently, the need for very high performance computing is larger than ever and growing. To date, high-performance computers have owed their speed primarily to advances in circuit and packaging technology. These technologies are subject to physical limits constraining the ultimate speed of a conventional uniprocessor computer. Parallel processing computers executing problems solutions expressed as parallel algorithms translated into parallel machine programs can exceed the single processor speed limit. The means for communication among processors, memory modules, and other devices of a parallel computer is the interconnection network.