Guest Editor's Introduction Interconnection Networks for Parallel and Distributed Processing

With the rapid advances in technology, it is now feasible to build a system consisting of hundreds or thousands of processors. Processors in such a parallel/distributed system may spend a considerable amount of time just communicating among themselves unless an efficient interconnection network (IN) connects them. A complete interconnection such as crossbar may be cost prohibitive, but a shared-bus interconnection may be inefficient and unreliable. The authors need to design INs with both cost and performance between these two extremes. Parallel or distributed computers can generally be divided into two categories: multiprocessors and multicomputers. The main difference between the two lies in the level at which interactions between the processors occur.