Switcherland - An Interconnect for Workstations

We introduce a scalable interconnect for workstations which uses crossbar switches and serial links. Connected to the interconnect are nodes such as I/O devices and processor/memory modules. Communication is based on load and store operations rather than on message passing, that is, all cluster memories reside in a single address space, and all locations are accessed in a uniform manner. This paper discusses the organization of the hardware that realizes the interconnect, the communication model, and the procedure to initialize the interconnect.