Intel Server Symposium


        NOW: System Design in the era of the "Killer Network"

			    David Culler
		      Computer Science Division
		  University of California, Berkeley

The natural evolution of the "killer micro" combined with the
emergence of the "killer network" is likely to position networks of
workstations (NOWs) as the primary computing infrastructure for
science and engineering, and for internet services.  They will provide
a vast pool of computational and storage resources for demanding
applications too large for the desktop, as well as the vehicle for
interactive computing.  In addition to moving parallel computing to a
mainstream infrastructure, this transformation brings the opportunity
to dramatically improve virtual memory and file system performance
using the aggregate memory of a NOW as a giant cache for disk and by
using collections of workstation disks as a soft RAID.  In this talk
we discuss technical challenges in exploiting these opportunities,
including fast, general purpose communication, coordination of
activity across multiple workstations, and organizing scalable
servers. We will present preliminary results from the Berkeley NOW
project.