Reconfigurable Systems: New Activities in Asia
FPL '00 Proceedings of the The Roadmap to Reconfigurable Computing, 10th International Workshop on Field-Programmable Logic and Applications
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Network-based parallel processing using commodity components, such as personal computers, has received attention as an important parallel-computing environment. In most of today's offices and laboratories, there are tens of personal computers and workstations, which are not always in use. If the processing power of such idle computers could be combined, the resulting processing power might be comparable to that of a supercomputer.However, most high performance cluster systems consisting of personal computers or workstations use a system area network (or a server area network: SAN) such as Myrinet [1] as their interconnection. Since they are designed to connect dedicated computers in a small place, both the link length and topology are restricted. On the other hand, high-speed LANs with more than 1 Gbps link bandwidth are becoming available. LANs provide relatively flexible topology choices and longer length of links. Nevertheless, the communication latency of most of today's commodity LANs tends to be larger than that of SANs because of their store-and-forward routing strategy. Moreover, today's LANs support the IP protocol, consisting of many layers, which introduce overhead. LASN (Local Area System Network) is a new class of network which has the advantages of both SANs and LANs.