The Paragon XP/S is a productized version of the experimental Touchstone Delta system that was built at Caltech, launched in 1992.
Intel intended the Paragon to run the OSF/1 AD distributed operating system on all processors.
However, this was found to be inefficient in practice, and a light-weight kernel called SUNMOS was developed at Sandia National Laboratories to replace OSF/1 AD on the Paragon's compute processors.
During system software development, a light-pen was duct-taped to the status LED on one board and a timer interrupt was used to bit bang a serial port[citation needed].
The IO boards have either SCSI drive interfaces or HiPPI network connections and are used to provide data to the compute nodes.