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Physical scaling
- Integration at various levels
- Chip-level integration to keep wires short: nCUBE/2 (1990) puts the processor, router, MMU, DRAM interface on a single chip
- Board-level integration: Thinking machine CM-5 uses the core of a Sun SparcStation 1 and other peripherals on a single board to realize a node
- System-level integration: IBM SP1 and SP2 exploit commodity RS6000 workstations and connect them through an external communication assist / network interface card and a router
IBM SP-2
Programming model
- Shared address space
- Communication initiated by load/store instructions
- Requires local or remote memory access before the data can be sent
- Request/response protocol initiated by receiver
- Message passing
- A one way communication: normally initiated by the sender
- Number of sends can be buffered before a matching receive shows up
- Synchronous vs. asynchronous sends
- Active messages
- Restricted form of remote procedure call
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