The MEMORY CHANNEL network is a dedicated cluster interconnect that provides virtual shared memory among nodes by means of internodal address space mapping. The interconnect implements direct user-level messaging and guarantees strict message ordering under all conditions, including transmission errors. These characteristics allow industry-standard communication interfaces and parallel programming paradigms to achieve much higher efficiency than on conventional networks. This paper presents an overview of the MEMORY CHANNEL network architecture and describes DIGITAL‘s crossbarbased implementation of the second-generation MEMORY CHANNEL network, MEMORY CHANNEL 2. This network provides bisection bandwidths of 1,000 to 2,000 megabytes per second and a sustained process-to-process bandwidth of 88 megabytes per second. One-way, processto-process message latency is less than 2.2 microseconds.

The NAS Parallel Benchmarks have been developed at NASA Ames Research Center to study the performance of parallel supercomputers. The eight benchmark problems are specified in a "pencil and paper" fashion. In other words, the complete details of the problem to be solved are given in a technical document, and except for a few restrictions, benchmarkers are mostly free to select the language constructs and implementation techniques best suited for a particular system. This paper presents performance results of various systems using the NAS Parallel Benchmarks. These results represent the best results that have been reported to us for the specific systems listed. Some changes and clarifications to the benchmark rules are also described. 1 Bailey and Barszcz are employees of NASA Ames Research Center. Dagum and Simon are employees of Computer Science Corp., and their work was funded by the NASA Ames Research Center under contract NAS2-12961. Mailing address for all authors: NASA Ames Rese...

The NAS Parallel Benchmarks have been developed at NASA Ames Research Center to study the performance of parallel supercomputers. The eight benchmark problems are specified in a "pencil and paper" fashion. In other words, the complete details of the problem to be solved are given in a technical document, and except for a few restrictions, benchmarkers are mostly free to select the language constructs and implementation techniques best suited for a particular system.