Patent ID: 7007161

Claim:
A method for fast booting an operating system on a multiprocessor system that is coupled in a two-dimensional array of interconnected nodes, wherein one of the nodes is designated as a primary boot master node which receives a sequence of data packets from an external source, wherein each of said data packets contains a portion of a boot image program and said sequence of data packets collectively represents said boot image program, said method comprising the steps of: forwarding, by said primary boot master node, a data packet to various nodes to which said primary boot master node is communicatively connected, wherein said nodes receiving the data packet from said primary boot master node are designated as secondary boot master nodes; forwarding, by each said secondary boot master node, the data packet to various other nodes to which this said secondary boot master node is communicatively connected and which lie in a direction orthogonal to the direction from which this said secondary boot master node has received the data packet from said primary boot master node, wherein said nodes receiving the data packet from said secondary boot master nodes are designated as tertiary nodes; wherein each node that has received a data packet stores the portion of said boot image program contained in the data packet in its memory for later use, and wherein one node does not send back the data packet to the other node from which said node has received the data packet; repeating the preceding steps until all portions of said boot image program have been received and forwarded; and starting the operation system on all nodes.