Switcherland - An Interconnect for Workstations

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

Abstract

We introduce a scalable interconnect for workstations which uses crossbar 
switches and serial links. Connected to the interconnect are nodes such as I/O 
devices and processor/memory modules. Communication is based on load and store 
operations rather than on message passing, that is, all cluster memories reside 
in a single address space, and all locations are accessed in a uniform manner. 
This paper discusses the organization of the hardware that realizes the 
interconnect, the communication model, and the procedure to initialize the 
interconnect. 

Keywords

I/O interconnect, workstation cluster interconnect, hardware support for 
multimedia