The Touchstone 30 Gigaflop DELTA Prototype

Abstract

In Sep tember , 1990, the Intel C o r p o r a t i o n demonstrated the third of four major Touchstone Program prototype systems. Denoted DELTA, the prototype scales to over 500 nodes, provides aggregate peak performance in excess of 30 GFLOP’s, and contains a new ,interconnect network based on a Caltech-designed router device. DELTA contains four heterogeneous node types f o r numeric, service, inputloutput, and network fmctions. The operating system supports message-passing paradigms and intefaces with a Concurrent File System. Users access DELTA across a local area network and may select either the C or FORTRAN programmin,g languages. An interactive parallel debugger assists in application development and performance tuning.