Multicomputers

Abstract

This report outlines the history, current status, current developments, and plans for the message-passing concurrent computers, or multicomputers, developed in the Submicron Systems Architecture Project at Caltech. These systems include the Cosmic Cube and its commercial descendants, two second-generation cosmic cubes currently in development, and the Mosaic C, a fine grain multicomputer whose nodes are single VLSI chips. Section 1 introduces the physical architectures, with particular attention to the characteristics of the message-passing networks. Section 2 describes the programming environments for the first and second generation medium grain size "cubes." Section 3 describes a fine grain concurrent object-oriented programming notation called Cantor, which currently runs on cubes and sequential systems, and which will be used for application programming of the Mosaic C.