The ParaPC/ParaStation project: efficient parallel computing by clustering workstations

ParaStation is a communications fabric for connecting off-the-shelf
workstations into a supercomputer. The fabric employs technology
used in massively parallel machines and scales up to 4096 nodes.
The message passing software preserves the low latency of the fabric
by taking the operating system out of the communication path, while
still providing full protection.

The first implementation of ParaStation using Digital's
AlphaGeneration workstations achieves end-to-end (process-to-process)
latencies as low as 2.5 us and a sustained bandwidth of more than
10 MByte/s per channel with small packets. Benchmarks using PVM on
ParaStation demonstrate real application performance of 1 GFLOP on
an 8-node cluster.