Processor in the Intel iPSC/860 and Paragon - early products aimed at massively parallel processing. These provided software seeds for the later Virtual Interf

Processor in the Intel iPSC/860 and Paragon - early products aimed at massively parallel processing. These provided software seeds for the later Virtual Interface Architecture and hence iWARP, Infiniband and others. The 860 interrupt overhead and non-determinism may have been the critical items that forced commercial productization of direct user mode network fabrics. I remember conversations at the time about the total S/W overhead for TCP/IP, and OS people forced to develop for i860s talking about the system level pain they had to get in and out of the TCP fastpath.