Platform1

Manufactured by Organisation name .

Overview of Platform:

A brief (and sometimes not-so-brief) overview of the platform, its origins, basic architecture, innovative features.

Compute Hardware:

A description of the chip/board/cpu that constitutes the principle compute node component of the platform. eg processor XYZ with floating point accelerator UVW.

Interconnect / Communications System:

A description or keyword describing how processors in the system communicate - eg hypercube, torus, fat-tree, shared bus,...

Memory System:

How memory is set up in the system - ie distributed per processor or shared or accessed using what paradigm,...

Benchmarks / Compute and data transfer performance:

This is not really useful unless it is data for a defunct platform or company, OR it is just a hyperlink to some one elses maintained data base of data.

Operating System Software and Environment:

This gives a brief description of the system software available for the platform. In some cases it also discusses any major tool available to make the platform easy to use.

Networkability/ I/O System / Integrability / Reliability / Scalability:

This section is to describe how well (or not) the platform can be integrated and just how "usable" it is, in a quantitative sort of way.

Notable Applications / Customers / Market Sectors:

This section is to indicate the major application sectors that the platform finds (or found) use in eg CFD, CEM, Databases, CAD, real time systems,...

Overall Comments:

This section is for any summarising comments -- in most cases personal ones by the author.


Ken Hawick , hawick@npac.syr.edu