Early machines such as Caltech Hypercube and first commercial Intel and nCUBE designs used a FIFO on each node to store and forward messages
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computing and message processing equivalenced
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Hardware close to programming Model; synchronous message passing
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Later Replaced by DMA, enabling non-blocking communication
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Buffered by system at destination until needed
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Diminishing role of topology in modern machines
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Store and forward routing: topology important
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Introduction of pipelined (worm hole) routing made topology largely irrelevant
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Cost is in node-network interface
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Simplifies programming
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64 node n=6 hypercube in Caltech Computer Science Dept.
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