A high performance distributed processing system

The authors describe an i860 based prototype add-on card as a computer server in a distributed system. Preliminary scalar oriented performance indicates that the card is about 35% (200%) faster than SUN SPARC station 1 rated at 1.7 MFLOPS (15.8 MIPS) running at 25 MHz. The most notable feature of the system is that it provides a run-time environment which is similar to running the Turbo C program under a DOS session. This feature increases portability and reduces the inertia for application porting. A low-cost high-performance networked server using i860 is being implemented. In this system, only one or two i860 cards are connected to a PC network of about 10 to 20 PC/ATs. The computer code of the Turbo-C program will run on the i860 server via an Ethernet network and the I/O code will be executed on the local PC/AT node. For the example of a 70×70 matrix floating point multiplication program, it is found that the system is about 55 times faster than executing the program on the local 12 MHz 286/10 MHz 287 AT node