Well, OK, PAPERS really does look very cute. The little wooden cases and flashing lights are downright adorable. Also, it is hard to take seriously anything that plugs into a PC's parallel (printer) port. However, PAPERS is a very serious research project, and these "cute" aspects are the natural result of engineering design decisions:

• The wooden boxes are cheap, easy to make, durable, and readily customized. They also avoid the cost and complexity of various mounting hardware.
• The flashing multicolor LEDs also may be cute, but they are by far the most efficient way to convey status information. The first PAPERS box used 40 single-color LEDs for four processor status display; using multicolor LEDs, each PE's status takes only one LED. Green means running, red means waiting, yellow means running OS code, and black means no parallel job is active.
• The parallel (printer) port doesn't offer much bandwidth, but it is universally available, can be accessed with less software overhead than other ports (e.g., SCSI or EIDE), and is thus the standard interface best suited to low-latency operations sending small amounts of data. There will be PCI bus PAPERS units later, but they will be more complex, more expensive, and harder for other universities to duplicate.

So, yes, the PAPERS boxes look cute, but they are very serious devices.

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