Donor note: There are two aspects worth mentioning: 1. Switcherland uses switches to connect computer subsystems as well as systems. In particular, it replaces peripheral busses with a switched interconnect. In this sense, it predecesses commercial developments such as Infiniband that will eventually replace the PCI bus. The advantages of switched interconnects are better scalability, improved reliability/availability/servicability. 2. Switcherland provides real- time guarantees for all data communication, external and internal to a computer system. The latter aspect is a unique feature of Switcherland that is still missing in commercial systems. Such guarantees are needed for processing continuous data such as video and audio. While some network technologies provide so-called Quality-of-service guarantees, similar guarantees need to be provided when data is transferred within a computer system. Switcherland tries to close this gap by providing an end-to-end real-time architecture. -Hans More info: http://www.cs.inf.ethz.ch/switcherland/ Documentation on included CD-ROM + article reprint "Switcherland: A Computer Architecture for Distributed Systems."
