Evaluating the basic performance of the Intel iPSC/860 parallel computer

We evaluate the basic performance of the Intel iPSC/860 computer, which can have up to 128 Intel i860-based nodes connected together with a hypercube network topology. After giving a brief overview of the system, the properties and bottlenecks of the hardware architecture and software environment are discussed. Basic memory, scalar and vector performance of a single node is evaluated, and the communication performance and the overlap of computation and communication are analysed.