Appeared in ACM Computer Communication Review, Oct. 1991.

An Integration of Network Communication with Workstation Architecture

Gregory G. Finn
Information Sciences Institute
University of Southern California
Marina del Rey, CA 90292
[email protected]
(310) 822-1511

Abstract:

A workstation may be thought of as a group of cooperatively connected subsystems. Point-to-point channels may be used to create a small-scale Gigabit LAN to which these subsystems are attached as nodes. This architectural foxus of such a workstation shifts towards its internal LAN. An attractive attribute of this LAN is that its aggregate capacity scales linearly with the number of nodes attached to it.
If the link-layer of the internal LAN is made equivalent to the link-layer of the external LAN, interior nodes become directly accessible externally. Except for latency the distinction between whether a node is inside a workstation versus outside it need not be significant. This property is particularly attractive for distributed communication-intensive applications.

full paper in PostScript

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