MIMD hypercube.

MIMD is for Multiple Instruction Multiple Data
Hypercube _ "

from http://netlib2.cs.utk.edu/utk/papers/sign/node8.html
The Intel Touchstone Delta computer system is 16 32 mesh of i860 processors with a wormhole routing interconnection network [41], located at the California Institute of Technology on behalf of the Concurrent Supercomputing Consortium. The Delta's communication characteristics are described in [43].

Touchstone Delta

Overview of Platform:

The Touchstone Delta System

It should be noted that this is a research prototype for the Paragon system and is not intended for commercial production.

Architecture: Distributed Memory MIMD hypercube.

Node: Intel's 32-bit 80860 RISC chip, performing at 60 MFLOPS peak, with 8--16 Mbytes of memory. Features include pipelining and instruction caching but these make it difficult to approach peak performance.

Topology: A mesh with wormhole routing.

Operating System: MACH, Express and CrOS III are available.

Communication Paradigms: Extensions for explicit message passing are available.

Languages: C and Fortran.

Programming Environment: Tools are available for debugging, code parallelizing and profiling.

Performance: Peak performance is 32 GFLOPS for the maximum configuration of 484 nodes. Delta has achieved the highest LINPACK rating ever, with 13.9 GFLOPS, and until recently held the record for the SLALOM benchmark, with 5750 patches.

from http://208.201.97.5/pubs/fcw/1998/0525/fcw-mktdelta-5-25-1998.html

MAY 25, 1998 RESEARCH Lights out for original 'fastest super' Federally funded Touchstone Delta set stage for later tech BY ELANA VARON (varon@fcw.com) The lights will go out on a piece of computing history May 29 when the California Institute of Technology pulls the plug on the first scalable parallel supercomputer to earn the title of fastest in the world. Built by Intel Corp. as a prototype seven years ago, mostly with federal funds, the 512-processor Touchstone Delta spawned a new era of scientific computing. The system gave government and university researchers, for the first time, enough computing power to pursue such groundbreaking applications as real-time processing of satellite images and molecular models for AIDS research. Although a second version was never built, the Delta was the foundation for even faster computers - some with thousands of processors - made by Intel and others and installed today at NASA, the Defense Department and the Energy Department as well as other federal labs. Those include systems made by Intel, IBM Corp. and Silicon Graphics Inc./Cray Research that are being used to model the condition of the nation's nuclear stockpile under DOE's Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI). ... Intel never planned to build a prototype as large as the Delta, said Justin Rattner, who designed the system and is now the director of Intel's Beaverton, Ore., Server Architecture Laboratory. However, Rattner said, "it had always been our experience that whenever we proposed to build a machine of a given size, the potential users wanted a machine at least twice that big.''

• Touchstone Delta Intel Supercomputing Systems Division
• Implementation and Performance on Intel Touchstone Delta