The Meerkat multicomputer

Meerkat is a distributed memory multicomputer architecture that scales to hundreds of processors. Meerkat uses at two dimensional passive backplane to connect nodes composed of processors, memory, and I/O devices. The interconnect is conceptually simple, inexpensive to design and build, has low latency, and provides high bandwidth on long messages. However, it does not scale to thousands of processors, does not provide cache coherent shared memory. Our hypothesis is that many general-purpose, database, and parallel numerical workloads work well on systems with Meerkat´s characteristics. We describe the Meerkat architecture, the niche that Meerkat fills, the motivation behind our design choices, and give performance results obtained from our hardware prototype and a calibrated simulator