Intel Paragon

Former world's most powerful supercomputer produced by Intel An experimental Touchstone Delta (1990) built at CaltechIntel Paragon XP/S (1992) at Computer History MuseumIntel Paragon XP/E (1993) single cabinet system Cats The Intel Paragon is a discontinued series of massively parallel supercomputers that was produced by Intel in the 1990s. The Paragon XP/S is a productized version of the experimental Touchstone Delta system that was built at Caltech, launched in 1992. The Paragon superseded Intel's earlier iPSC/860 system, to which it is closely related. The Paragon series is based on the Intel i860 RISC microprocessor. Up to 2048 (later, up to 4096) i860s are connected in a 2D grid. In 1993, an entry-level Paragon XP/E variant was announced with up to 32 compute nodes. Mesh interconnect on XP/E cabinet The system architecture is a partitioned system, with the majority of the system comprising diskless compute nodes and a small number of I/O nodes interactive service nodes. Since the bulk of the nodes have no permanent storage, it is possible to "Red/Black switch" the compute partition from classified to unclassified by disconnecting one set of I/O nodes with classified disks and