Switcherland - A Scalable Interconnection Structure for Distributed Computing

Hans Eberle
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Institute of Computer Systems, 
CH-8092 Zurich, Switzerland

Abstract

This paper describes a scalable interconnection structure for distributed 
computing systems. The interconnection structure is scalable in that it can 
serve as an I/O interconnection structure of a workstation as well as a network 
interconnection structure for a group or cluster of workstations.
Switcherland implements a communication model based on a distributed shared 
memory architecture. With it, local communication within a workstation and 
remote communication within a cluster of workstations translate to load and 
store operations which are applied to a distributed memory which resides in a 
single address space.

Switcherland offers quality of service (QoS) in that memory can be accessed at 
guaranteed rates and access times are bounded. This feature is an essential 
prerequisite for the integration of video and audio into a workstation 
environment and allows systems to treat video and audio like standard data 
types.

Keywords

interconnection structure, quality of service, distributed shared memory, 
loosely-coupled parallel computing.