Patent ID: 8296465

Claim:
A distributed computing bus that connects two computing elements, the bus comprising: a network fabric of interconnected field programmable nodes; a fabric manager adapted to configure a bus topology among the nodes where the bus topology provides a communication route through the fabric allowing two computing elements to interact via exchanging a packet having payload data where the packet is exchanged according to a protocol; wherein at least one of the nodes that is an intermediary node between the computing elements along the communication route is field programmed to operate on the payload data according to a computational function of a computation topology as the packet is routed through the intermediary node; and wherein the fabric manager is further adapted to reconfigure the bus topology within an average latency of data transport across the fabric between the computing elements while the two computing elements retain connectivity via the protocol, and while retaining execution of the computational function through a reconfiguration of the bus topology by reconfiguring the computation topology while also retaining execution of the computational function within the computation topology.