Diskless supercomputers: Scalable, reliable I/O for the Tera-Op technology base

Computing is seeing an unprecedented improvement in performance; over the last five years there has been an order-of-magnitude improvement in the speeds of workstation CPU's. At least another order of magnitude seems likely in the next five years, to machines with 500 MIPS or more. The goal of the ARPA Teraop program is to realize even larger, more powerful machines, executing as many as a trillion operations per second. Unfortunately, we have seen no comparable breakthroughs in I/O performance; the speeds of I/O devices and the hardware and software architectures for managing them have not changed substantially in many years. We have completed a program of research to demonstrate hardware and software I/O architectures capable of supporting the kinds of internetworked 'visualization' workstations and supercomputers that will appear in the mid 1990s. The project had three overall goals: high performance, high reliability, and scalable, multipurpose system.