The Caracas Multiprocessor System

Abstract

This paper presents the Caracas Multiprocessor (CMPS) System design, which is a current project of the IBM Caracas Scientific Center. The main characteristic of the CMPS is the combination of a bus architecture with a point-to-point interconnection network. The bus system is based on the Microchannel architecture. The processing elements are provided with an Intel 80286 processor, a dual-port memory, four transputer link adaptors, and some control logic. The communication between PEs can be established via bus by memory-to-memory block transfers and directly via serial links. The links are commuted with help of a programmable switch network. The host is connected via a Microchannel bus, and can be a system such as the IBM PS/2 or the IBM RISC SYSTEM/6000 computers.