High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The Intel Paragon was a series of massively parallel supercomputers produced by Intel. The Paragon XP/S was a productized version of the experimental Touchstone Delta system built at Caltech, launched in 1992. The Paragon superseded Intel's earlier iPSC/860 system, to which it was closely related.The Paragon series was based around the Intel i860 RISC microprocessor. Up to 2048 (later, up to 4000) i860s were connected in a 2D grid. In 1993, an entry-level Paragon XP/E variant was announced with up to 32 compute nodes. The system architecture was a partitioned system, with the majority of the system comprising diskless compute nodes and a small number of I/O nodes interactive service nodes. Since the bulk of the nodes had no permanent storage, it was possible to "Red/Black switch" the compute partition from classified to unclassified by disconnecting one set of I/O nodes with classified disks and then connecting an unclassified I/O partition.