High speed serial communication in a future parallel computer architecture

In this paper, we introduce the concept and hardware configuration of a high speed serial communication interface called STAFF-Link. STAFF-link is used in a massively parallel computer JUMP-I for connecting processing elements and I/O subsystems and also used for an I/O network between I/O units. Furthermore have designed and manufactured a STAFF-Link router board for a high performance workstation cluster. In the workstation cluster, we have implemented a distributed shared-memory system based on a software controlled cache. The system demonstrates that a workstation cluster connected with a lot of such serial links is one of hopeful candidates of future high performance computing system.