Supernode

The Supernode 1 project ran from 1985 to 1988 and its aim was the design and production of a distributed memory MIMD parallel computer based on the INMOS T8 transputer. Funding was provided under European Community (ESPRIT 1 project P1085) and involved companies and institutions throughout Europe. The project involved the design and production of the hardware platform and supporting software including compilers, debuggers, run-time systems, and scientific numerical libraries.

Our group at the University of Liverpool developed a library of dense linear algebra routines for distributed data including operations such as matrix matrix multiplication and solving systems of linear equations. The library design used the master-slaves programming model with a sequential master process invoking a sequence of operations on the data distributed over the array of slave processes.

The successful Supernode 1 project was followed by the Supernode 2 project (ESPRIT 2 project P2528) which ran from 1989 to 1993. The main thrust of this project was the development of scientific applications for the system designed in Supernmode 1. In this project we enhanced and expanded the numerical library.