ECOLE: A Configurable Environment for a Local Optical Network of Workstations

ECOLE is a project concerned with the implementation of highly efficient parallel computation on a network of generic workstations connected by a very high speed optical LAN. It is founded on research conducted at BT Laboratories, which has resulted in SynchroLan — a multi-gigabit LAN billed as the fastest LAN in the world. A holistic approach to system design is taken, to identify all possible hardware and software improvements that might allow a workstation to harness fully the raw capacity of a multi-gigabit network. Two important features of the work are the inclusion of configurable hardware and the use of active protocols — both of these are to introduce overall flexibility, without compromising efficiency by more than a small amount. The work benefits from the use of advanced techniques for modelling and simulation of experimental architectures. This paper explains how the ECOLE project acts as a very practical focus for several existing lines of advanced systems research being undertaken at the University of Edinburgh.

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