Intel Paragon XP/S - Architecture and Software Environment

The paper describes the hardware and software components of the Intel Paragon XP/S system, a distributed memory scalable multicomputer. The Paragon processing nodes, which are based on the Intel i860 XP RISC processor, are connected by a two-dimensional mesh with high bandwidth. This new interconnection network and the new operating system are the main differences between the Paragon and its predecessor, the iPSC/860 with its hypercube topology. The paper first gives an overview of the Paragon system architecture, the node architecture, the interconnection network, I/O interfaces, and peripherals. The second part outlines the Paragon OSF/1 operating system and the program development environment including programming models, compilers, application libraries, and tools for parallelization, debugging, and performance analysis