Intel Paragon

An experimental Touchstone Delta (1990) built at Caltech

Intel Paragon XP/S (1992) at Computer History Museum

Intel Paragon XP/E (1993) single cabinet system Cats

The Intel Paragon is a discontinued series of

iPSC/860

system, to which it is closely related.

The Paragon series is based on the

RISC microprocessor

. Up to 2048 (later, up to 4096) i860s are connected in a 2D grid. In 1993, an entry-level Paragon XP/E variant was announced with up to 32 compute nodes.

The system architecture is a partitioned system, with the majority of the system comprising diskless compute nodes and a small number of I/O nodes interactive service nodes. Since the bulk of the nodes have no permanent storage, it is possible to "Red/Black switch" the compute partition from classified to unclassified by disconnecting one set of I/O nodes with classified disks and then connecting an unclassified I/O partition.

Intel intended the Paragon to run the OSF/1 AD distributed operating system on all processors. However, this was found to be inefficient in practice, and a light-weight kernel called SUNMOS was developed at Sandia National Laboratories to replace OSF/1 AD on the Paragon's compute processors.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory operated a Paragon XP/S 150 MP, one of the largest Paragon systems, for several years.

The prototype for the Intel Paragon was the Intel Delta, built by Intel with funding from

Moore's Law

.

Compute nodes

GP16 Compute node, component side
GP16 solder side with jumpers
Compute nodes inside the XP/E rack
Compute (and some I/O) nodes in XP/E rack

The computer boards was produced in two variants: the GP16 with 16 MB of memory and two CPUs, and the MP16 with three CPUs. Each node has a B-NIC interface that connects to the mesh routers on the backplane. The compute nodes are diskless and performed all I/O over the mesh. During system software development, a light-pen was duct-taped to the status LED on one board and a timer interrupt was used to

bit bang a serial port^{[citation needed}

].

The B-NIC ASIC is the square chip with the circular heat-sink.