This award supports Professors Dan Moldovan and Eric Lin and two graduate students, all from Southern Methodist University, to collaborate in computer science and engineering research with Professor H. Richter and others of the Computer Science Department of the Technical University of Munich, Germany. They share an interest in parallel computing systems and in particular the architecture of the `Scalable Coherent Interface` (SCI) - based parallel computers. Together they plan to study, design and evaluate a distributed computer system consisting of a network of multiprocessors. The U.S. group has developed a parallel computer called `Semantic Network Array Processor` (SNAP), which they want to scale up. The German group has done similar work with a network of multiprocessors. Their joint effort will benefit from their complementary expertise in different operating systems, network architecture and approaches to parallel programming environments. The increasing sophistication of microprocessors still lags behind the escalating demand in science and industry. This research addresses scalability questions related to a new aggregation architecture for a Local-Area Multiprocessor (LAMP). The objective is to satisfy rapidly evolving network user needs at the lowest long term cost and high efficiency.
