The HPC/VORX local area multicomputer system

The HPC/VORX system supports communication performance typically found in closely coupled parallel processors across significant geographic distances. With such a system it is reported to be possible to combine the two computer architectures, local area networks (LANs) and medium-grain multicomputers into a single unified system. The hardware consists of a high-capacity, low-latency interconnection network called the HPC capable of growing gracefully from systems with twelve nodes or less to systems encompassing thousands of nodes. The VORX multiprocessor computing environment provides program development tools and resource management functions for experimenting with distributed applications. An eighty-node system that includes ten SUN 3 workstations/fileservers and seventy adjunct processors has been running since October 1988