Steve Ward, Karim Abdalla, Rajeev Dujari, Michael Fetterman, Frank Honoré, Ricardo Jenez, Philippe Laffont, Ken Mackenzie, Chris Metcalf, Milan Minsky, John Nguyen, John Pezaris, Gill Pratt, and Russell Tessier. The NuMesh: A Modular, Scalable Communications Substrate. Proceedings of the International Conference on Supercomputing, July 1993. (compressed postscript)

Abstract:

Many standardized hardware communication interfaces offer run-time flexibility and configurability at the cost of efficiency. An alternate approach is the use of a highly-efficient, minimal communication element, with as much communication decision-making as possible done at compile time. NuMesh is a packaging and interconnect technology supporting high-bandwidth systolic communications on a 3D nearest-neighbor lattice; our goal is to combine Lego-like modularity with supercomputer performance. To date, the primary focus of the project has been the class of applications whose static communication patterns can be precompiled into independent and carefully choreographed finite state machines running on each node. Several extensions of the NuMesh to more general communication paradigms have been implemented, and the issues involved are under active exploration.

This paper presents an overview of our approach, as well as an introduction to our current-generation prototype. We also discuss our software environment and simulation technology, and enumerate some of the applications and programming models we have developed to make full use of the capabilities of the NuMesh.