Interconnection networks: Dimensions in design

The interconnection network is the switching fabric responsible for providing communication between all processors in a parallel computer. Much research has been directed towards developing superior interconnec-tion networks, but there is no general agreement that this problem is solved. The speakers for this panel session were asked to address the following question: for a given range of number of commodity high-pe$ormance proces-sors (e.g. 256 to 1024) what interconnection network should be used to build a general purpose MIMD parallel machine. 1