A network architecture for distributed high performance heterogeneous computing

Network computing has the potential for dramatically increasing the amount of computing power available to large scale compute intensive applications. The authors describe a network architecture upon which a high performance distributed computing environment may be constructed. The architecture uses a specially designed time and wavelength division multiplexed (TWDM) optical passive star as the underlying high speed network. The network architecture is flexible enough to support the many different communication patterns of distributed applications by embedding a computation directly within the system hardware