The Switcherland Distributed Computing System

Michaela Blott, Hans Eberle, Erwin Oertli, Peter Ryser
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology
Institute of Computer Systems
CH-8092 Zurich, Switzerland

Abstract

Switcherland is a distributed computing system optimized for running 
applications that process continuous data such as video and audio. For this 
purpose, Switcherland implements a communication model that offers quality of 
service (QoS) for a distributed shared memory architecture. QoS is provided in 
that memory can be accessed at guaranteed rates and in bounded time. 
Switcherland is based on a scalable interconnection structure that can serve as 
an I/O interconnection structure of a workstation as well as a network 
interconnection structure of a cluster of workstations.
This paper gives an overview of the architecture and communication model 
implemented by Switcherland and describes the system components we are currently 
building.

Keywords

interconnection structure, quality of service, distributed shared memory, 
cluster computing.