The Intel Paragon is a discontinued series of
massively parallel supercomputers that was produced by
Intel
Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the devel ...
in the 1990s. The Paragon XP/S is a productized version of the experimental ''Touchstone Delta'' system that was built at
Caltech, launched in 1992. The Paragon superseded Intel's earlier
iPSC/860 system, to which it is closely related.
The Paragon series is based on the
Intel i860 RISC microprocessor
A microprocessor is a computer processor where the data processing logic and control is included on a single integrated circuit, or a small number of integrated circuits. The microprocessor contains the arithmetic, logic, and control circu ...
. Up to 2048 (later, up to 4096) i860s are connected in a 2D grid. In 1993, an entry-level Paragon XP/E variant was announced with up to 32 compute nodes.
The system architecture is a partitioned system, with the majority of the system comprising diskless compute nodes and a small number of I/O nodes interactive service nodes. Since the bulk of the nodes have no permanent storage, it is possible to "Red/Black switch" the compute partition from classified to unclassified by disconnecting one set of I/O nodes with classified disks and then connecting an unclassified I/O partition.
Intel intended the Paragon to run the
OSF/1 AD
distributed operating system on all processors. However, this was found to be inefficient in practice, and a
light-weight kernel called
SUNMOS was developed at
Sandia National Laboratories to replace OSF/1 AD on the Paragon's compute processors.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory operated
Paragon XP/S 150 MP one of the largest Paragon systems, for several years.
The prototype for the Intel Paragon was the Intel Delta, built by Intel with funding from
DARPA
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military.
Originally known as the Ad ...
and installed operationally at the
California Institute of Technology in the late 1980s with funding from the
National Science Foundation. The Delta was one of the few computers to sit significantly above the curve of
Moore's Law.
Compute nodes
Image:Paragon XP-E - GP16 top.jpg, GP16 Compute node, component side
Image:Paragon XP-E - GP16 bottom.jpg, GP16 Solder side with jumpers
Image:Paragon XP-E - inside.jpg, Compute nodes inside the XP/E rack
Image:Paragon XP-E - bottom rack.jpg, Compute (and some I/O) nodes in XP/E rack
The computer boards was produced in two variants: the GP16 with 16 MB of memory and two CPUs, and the MP16 with three CPUs. Each node has a B-NIC interface that connects to the mesh routers on the backplane. The compute nodes are diskless and performed all I/O over the mesh. During system software development, a light-pen was duct-taped to the status LED on one board and a timer interrupt was used to
bit bang a
serial port.
The B-NIC
ASIC is the square chip with the circular heat-sink.
I/O nodes
Image:Paragon XP-E - MP64 top.jpg, MP64 I/O node, component side
Image:Paragon XP-E - MP64 side.jpg, MP64 I/O node HPPI interface
Image:Paragon XP-E - top rack.jpg, Disk cabinets in XP/E rack
The IO boards have either
SCSI drive interfaces or
HiPPI network connections and are used to provide data to the compute nodes. They do not run any user applications. The MP64 I/O node has three i860 CPUs and an
i960 CPU used in the disk controller.
References
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{{S-end
Intel products
Massively parallel computers
Supercomputers
Very long instruction word computing
32-bit computers