SPAX: a new parallel processing system for commercial applications

A new parallel processing system for commercial applications, called SPAX, is described. SPAX cost-effectively overcomes the SMP limitation by providing scalability of the parallel processing system and application portability of the SMP. We also describe a new system network, called Xcent-Net, which interconnects hundreds of multiprocessor PC boards in SPAX. It is a hierarchical network that provides incremental scalability with minimum re-wiring when the user's requirement is changed. This is based on the low latency crossbar routers on each hierarchy, which consist a router-cloud and provide up to 2.67 Gbytes/sec/router-cloud of bandwidth. We briefly describe the preliminary evaluation result that shows Xcent-Net will not be the bottleneck in the system running a typical commercial application.