Tightly Coupled MPP's were (SP2,Paragon,CM5 etc) distributed memory but at least at the low end they are becoming hardware assisted shared memory
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Unclear how well compilers will support this in a scaling fashion -- we will see how SGI/Cray systems based ideas pioneered at Stanford fair!
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Note this is an example of COTS at work -- SGI/Sun/.. Symmetric Multiprocessors (Power Challenge from SGI) attractive as bus will support upto 16 processors in elegant shared memory software world.
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Previously such systems were not pwerful enough to be interesting
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Clustering such SGI Power Challenge like systems produces a powerful but difficult to program (as both distributed and shared memory) heterogeneous system
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Meanwhile Tera Computer will offer a true Uniform Memory access shared memory using ingenious multi threaded software/hardware to hide latency
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Unclear if this competitive in cost/performance with (scruffy) COTS approach
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