Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!cbatt!ihnp4!inuxc!pur-ee!uiucdcs!uiucdcsp!johnson
From: johnson@uiucdcsp.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: shared memory multiproc. question
Message-ID: <76700002@uiucdcsp>
Date: Wed, 4-Feb-87 12:29:00 EST
Article-I.D.: uiucdcsp.76700002
Posted: Wed Feb  4 12:29:00 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 7-Feb-87 18:57:47 EST
References: <76700001@uiucdcsp>
Lines: 17
Nf-ID: #R:uiucdcsp:76700001:uiucdcsp:76700002:000:775
Nf-From: uiucdcsp.cs.uiuc.edu!johnson    Feb  4 11:29:00 1987


/* Written  9:10 am  Feb  2, 1987 by crowl@rochester.ARPA  */

>>Single bus multiprocessors tend to not scale much past 32 processors. 

I would be happy with a dozen.

>>Other interconnection topologies scale better.  The Intel Hypercube and 
>>the BBN Butterfly scale with O(n log n) interconnection costs. 

This is all fine, but the Butterfly is pretty expensive, and the various
hypercubes are hard to use.  The Sequent and Multimax (to name the ones
that I know about) are quite good and much more cost effective than a
supermini for the things that we use them for, i.e. student computing and
text processing.  Different kinds of machines are good for different kinds
of things, and I want a very cheap shared memory multiprocessor with only
a handful of processors.