The Intel Paragon, an MPP

This is an MPP, a Massively Parallel Processor. Small Paragons could contain as few as 64 microprocessors, but the largest Paragon built contained 6,768 microprocessors.

The communication within an MPP is often organized as either 2 dimensional or 3 dimensional, and either as a mesh (grid) or a torus (doughnut). However, some of the Paragon's competitors have used fat-trees, banyan trees, butterfly networks, combining networks, hypercubes, or crossbars. Some machines use a great many bit-serial links, but the recent trend is towards having fewer, wider links.

The Paragon was built from 50 MHz Intel i860's. More recently, Intel built a similar 9,152-processor machine from 200 MHz Pentium Pro's. Running the Linpack benchmark, Intel reported its performance as 1.338 teraflops. (This means: while inverting a 235,000 by 235,000 matrix, the machine does 1.338 x 10^12 64-bit floating point operations per second.)


Last modified: 12 November 1998

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