ECOLE: A Configurable Environment for a Local Optical Network of Workstations

摘要

ECOLE is a project concerned with the implementation of highly efficient parallel computation on a network of generic workstations conected by a very high speed optical LAN. It is founded o research conducted at BT Laboratories, which has resulted in Synchrolan-a multi-gigabit LAN billed as the fastest LAN in the world.A holistic approach to system design is taken, to identify all possible hardware and software improvements that might allow a workstation to harness fully the raw capacity of a multi-gigabit network. Two important features of the work are the inclusion of conigurable hardware and the use of active protocols-both of these are to introduce overall flexiility, without compromissing efficiency by more than a small amount. The work benefits from the use of advanced techniques for modelling and simulation of experimental architectures. This paper explains how the ECOLE project act as a very practical focus for several existing lines of advanced systems research being undertaken at the University of edinburgh.