PERSPECTIVES IN ADVANCED COMPUTING - AN ARCHITECTURE FOR MASSIVELY-PARALLEL SUPERCOMPUTERS

The grand challenge of the 1990s is to build teraflops performance supercomputers. The teraflops supercomputers are required to solve the so called grand challenge problems of science and engineering. Several such grand challenge problems have now been posed and the lot is continuously growing. As single processor performance approaches its theoretical limits, the only way to realize such supercomputers is through massively parallel processors (MPP), incorporating thousands of powerful computing elements. This paper presents architectural requirement of such MPPs. The hey factors which influence the performance of MPPs is scalability of computation and communications. The transputer with balanced computation and communications on a single chip is seen as an ideal computing dement to build parallel machines in general and MPPs in particular. The transputer architecture is explained to emphasize this. The new generation transputer T9000 with C104 wormhole router is seen as a preferred computing and communication element to realize scalable supercomputers in the teraflops range. An architecture for building a general purpose massively parallel processing system based on T9000 transputers and C104 routing chips is deliberated.