🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <AGLEW.90Jan31205148@dwarfs.csg.uiuc.edu> aglew@dwarfs.csg.uiuc.edu (Andy Glew) writes:
>One of the busses may be designated the "global" bus, listened to by all 
>processors.
>    Others might be allocated to connect groups of processors (and I/O
>controllers) as needed.  This reconfiguration would be done infrequently.
>    So, for example, if you have an I/O going on, allocate it a bus
>for the (long) duration of the I/O.
>    Or, if a group of programs appear to communicate heavily, allocate
>them a private bus.

There exists a commercial product that looks like this: The Cogent
Research (Beaverton, Oregon) XTM.  A box of processors has a parallel
broadcast bus, used for exchanging synchronisation information, and
4 32-way crossbar switches connecting the 20-Mbit/sec serial DMA
links of the transputers.  These get used for sending larger messages
(like file I/O) around.  The link controller is a dedicated processor
that also lives on the global broadcast bus.  It's a lot faster than
a LAN (I forget exactly, but channel setup times are a few microseconds),
but a lot slower than a processor bus.

So somebody thinks it's a good idea... :-)
-- 
	-Colin