The Alewife CMMU: Addressing the Multiprocessor Communications Gap

Company X has just expended 50 engineers over the last three years to produce their latest microprocessor. Now what? Well, popular wisdom suggests that they should connect a \bunch" of the micros together with some generic network to form a multiprocessor. This will yield \truly impressive performance" which the marketing department can quantify by multiplying the number of processors per box by the stellar MIPS-rating of the new microprocessor. Right?