Performance evaluation of the Transtech PARAstation/i860 multiprocessor

The authors analyze the computation and communication performance of the Transtech PARAstation/i860 multiprocessor, a distributed memory system built of nodes with an Intel i860 processor as computational engine and a transputer T805 handling communications. The efficiency of the i860 computing processor is analyzed using various basic vector operations and the matrix multiplication, in Fortran language; the communication speed is then measured against the distance between the nodes for both i860 and transputer processes.