Abstract: A computer system includes a priority arbitration scheme that prevents "hogging" of a bus by a priority agent. The computer system comprises at least one agent, at least one priority agent, a system resource, and a bus coupling the agent, priority agent, and system resource to one another. An arbiter is coupled to the bus, agent, and priority agent to receive request signals from the agent and the priority agent and to grant control of the bus to one of the agent and priority agent for access to the system resource. The priority agent is granted control of the bus whenever the priority agent asserts a request signal, as soon as the bus becomes next available. The priority agent relinquishes control of the bus to the agent, for a predetermined portion of the bus bandwidth, when a request signal is asserted by the agent.

Abstract: A massively parallel data processing system is disclosed. This data processing system includes a plurality of nodes, with each node having at least one processor, a memory for storing data, a processor bus that couples the processor to the memory, and a remote memory access controller coupled to the processor bus. The remote memory access controller detects and queues processor requests for remote memory, processes and packages the processor requests into request packets, forwards the request packets to the network through a router that corresponds to that node, receives and queues request packets received from the network, recovers the memory request from the request packet, manipulates local memory in accordance with the request, generates an appropriate response packet acceptable to the network and forwards the response packet to the requesting node.