ABSTRACT
The Intel Paragon XP/S system offers a high level of performance, flexibility, usability, and programming for demanding supercomputing applications. The Paragon system delivers scalable performance of up to 300 GFLOPS, backed with an architecture that will yield affordable, practical teraFLOPS by the middle of the decade. The Paragon operating system, a full implementation of UNIX, also scales, ensuring that delivered operating system services match hardware performance as system size increases. The Paragon system employs a scalable, heterogeneous multicomputer architecture. The Paragon interconnection network provides low latency and high bandwidth between every node in the system. The basic Paragon node design is used within the system in several ways: computation, input/output, and service. Anticipating future developments, the Paragon interconnect is open to future technology insertion. The Paragon architecture utilizes atwo-dimensional mesh network topology, originally developed under the Intel-DARPA Touchstone project. The architecture of the Paragon system is reflected in the implementation: flexible, scalable, and modular.
