MIMD hypercube.

MIMD is for Multiple Instruction Multiple Data
Hypercube _ "

from http://wwwmcb.cs.colorado.edu/home/capp/paragon.html

INTEL PARAGON Oliver A. McBryan In late 1992, Intel shipped a commercial version of the DELTA, called Paragon. The Paragon uses the same rectangular grid structure as the DELTA, but faster processing nodes. The system is designed with scalability in mind from the outset. Initial systems are designed to have up to 2048 nodes with a peak rate of 300 Gflops. The largest systems will have 128 GBytes of main memory, with an aggregate 500 GByte/sec aggregate bandwidth, and access to over 1 TByte of internal disk with an aggregate bandwidth of 6.4 GByte/sec. Communication bandwidth between nodes is 200 MBytes/sec full duplex Paragon software plans indicate a substantial divergence from previous Intel systems. The basic software environment is the same as on the iPSC2 - a library of message passing routines. However the Paragon also supports a full UNIX (Mach) kernel in each node, along with a node-level virtual memory. Finally Intel has indicated that a virtual shared memory capability will also be available across nodes. The Paragon node contains two identical Intel i860XP processors, an improved 50MHz version of the i860 used in previous Intel systems. This processor has peak rates of 75 flops (64-bit) and 42 MIPS and can support from 16-128 MBytes with a 400 MByte/sec processor-memory bandwidth and an 800 MByte/sec processor-cache bandwidth. The second processor on a node id dedicated entirely to communications processing. Paragon nodes are organized into three partitions: the Compute partition, the Service partition and the I/O partition. Parallel applications and a UNIX micro-kernel reside on the Compute partition. The Compute partition can be subdivided into subpartitions allocated to either interactive or batch processing, and there may be any number of each kind. Partition sizes and shapes may be change at any time. Batch processing is provided through the standard NQS system. The Service partition provides full operating system facilities such as shells, editors and compilers. This partition can grow or shrink in time with the system running, according to user needs. Compute partition and Service partition nodes are identical, allowing repartitioning between these partitions at any time. The I/O partition provides disk, tape and network connections. I/O nodes include SCSI nodes for disks and tapes, VME nodes for specialized devices, and HiPPI nodes for connection to disk arrays and frame buffers. These nodes can can also be used as Service partition nodes, but are never allocated to the Compute partition. By increasing the I/O partition size as the system grows, I/O capabilities can scale to match the computational capabilities. Applications can avail of both UNIX OSF/1 facilities and Intel NX/2 operating system facilities for interaction between nodes, or with Service partition nodes.

About the Intel Paragon Computer by Dave Turner (turner@ameslab.gov)

ISU's Intel Paragon was originally part of a 1024-node machine. Last year, an Intel Paragon supercomputer joined the computing resources in the Computation Center's machine room. This 256-node Paragon was originally part of the 1024-node machine at Oak Ridge National Lab that was at one time the world's fastest computer. It was decommissioned at the end of April 1999, and Ames Lab was able to pick it up for the price of shipping and installation. For $14,000, we picked up a machine that would have cost us $5,000,000 just 5 years ago. ISU agreed to house it in the basement of the Durham Center, and both ISU and Ames Lab researchers are using this machine. The Paragon has 16 rows and 16 columns of nodes, with a 2D mesh connecting them. Most nodes have 64 MB, of which 7 MB is used for the OS (OSF1). 64 of the nodes have 128 MB of memory. Each node actually has 3 processors. One handles communications at all times, while the other two are for computations. The processors are 75 MHz i860s, which run at 5-20 MFlops or more depending on the code. The communication rate tops out at around 130 MB/sec for 1 MB messages, with a latency of around 100 usecs.

• The Intel Paragon XP/S Purdue, intro readings, and manuals
• INTEL PARAGON Colorado
• Welcome to the Intel Scalable Server Products Division web page that contains all the current information on the Intel TeraFLOPS program.