ABSTRACT
Nowadays, computers are a common tool at the office and home. The widespread use of computers has been made possible thanks to the continuously improving performance/cost ratio and, most important of all, to the availability of powerful and useful applications and services. As computers are becoming widespread, the way computers are used is evolving significantly. The widespread availability of Internet access motivated the development of new network-based services (WWW, e-commerce, etc.). As a consequence, the computational burden is moving from desktop computers to large highperformance servers. These servers require powerful processors and fast largecapacity disks. But, what is the role of interconnects in this context? Do we really need high-speed interconnects to provide those services? Many people, especially home users, believe that just increasing the bandwidth of their Internet connection is enough. However, the situation is likely to change very rapidly in the near future, as described in the next sections.
