The PASM prototype interconnection network design

Computer system design costs traditionally have been dominated by the development and production costs of hardware. The availability of large-scale integrated circuitry has dramatically cut the cost of system hardware to the point where new architectural designs can be built and tested at a comparatively low cost. The P ASM prototype currently under development will be used to validate the design principles and operations of a large-scale, dynamically reconfigurable parallel processing sys. tern. The interconnection network of the PASM prototype, an implementation of a circuit-switched extra stage cube topology, is described in this paper. Network design tradeoffs and implementation options are discussed and related to the performance, development cost, and production cost of the network and the overall prototype system.