One of the coolest class projects I worked on in school back in the mid 90's was a compiler for TTL_PAPERS, which was a hardware-assisted low-latency interconne

One of the coolest class projects I worked on in school back in the mid 90's was a compiler for TTL_PAPERS, which was a hardware-assisted low-latency interconnect between PCs used for barrier synchronization. It was also correspondingly low bandwidth, but for the cases where synchronization was your bottleneck, it was hard to beat it. More info from the inventor (Hank Dietz) here: http://aggregate.org/TechPub/ICPP95/icpp95.html http://aggregate.org/TechPub/ICPP95/icpp95.html