- Intel Paragon
The Intel Paragon was a series of
massively parallel supercomputer s produced byIntel . The Paragon XP/S was a productized version of the experimental "Touchstone Delta" system built atCalTech , launched in 1992. The Paragon superseded Intel's earlier iPSC/860 system, to which it was closely related.The Paragon series was based around the
i860 RISC microprocessor . Up to 2048 (later, up to 4000) i860s were connected in a 2D grid. In 1993, an entry-level Paragon XP/E variant was announced with up to 32 processors.Intel intended the Paragon to run the
OSF/1 ADdistributed operating system on all processors. However, this was found to be inefficient in practice, and a light-weight kernel calledSUNMOS was developed atSandia National Laboratories to replace OSF/1 AD on the Paragon's compute processors.The prototype for the Intel Paragon was the Intel Delta, built by Intel with funding from
DARPA and installed operationally at theCalifornia Institute of Technology in the late 1980s with funding from theNational Science Foundation . The Delta was one of the few computers to sit significantly above the curve ofMoore's Law .References
* [http://www.top500.org/orsc/1997/paragon.html Top500 description of the Paragon]
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