Telegraphos: high-performance networking for parallel processing on workstation clusters

Networks of workstations and high-performance microcomputers have been rarely used for running high-performance applications like multimedia, simulations, scientific and engineering applications, because, although they have significant aggregate computing power, they lack the support for efficient message-passing and shared-memory communication. In this paper we present Telegraphos, a distributed system that provides efficient shared-memory support on top of a workstation cluster. We focus on the network interface of Telegraphos that provides a variety of shared-memory operations like remote reads, remote writes, remote atomic operations, all launched from user level without any intervention of the operating system. Telegraphos I, the first Telegraphos prototype has been implemented. Emphasis was put on rapid prototyping, so the technology used was conservative: FPGA's, SRAM's, and TTL buffers. Telegraphos II, is the single-chip version of the Telegraphos architecture; its switch was implemented and its network interface is being debugged.

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