Title :
Firefly: a multiprocessor workstation
Author :
Thacker, C.P. ; Stewart, Lawrence C. ; Satterthwaite, Edwin H., Jr.
Author_Institution :
Digital Equipment Corp., Palo Alto, CA, USA
fDate :
8/1/1988 12:00:00 AM
Abstract :
The Firefly shared-memory multiprocessor workstation system consists of from one to nine VLSI VAX processors, each with a floating-point accelerator and a cache. The caches are coherent, so that all processors see a consistent view of main memory. The Firefly runs a software system (Topaz) that emulates the Ultrix system call interface, and in addition provides support for multiprocessing through multiple threads of control in a single address space. Communication is provided uniformly through the use of remote procedure call. The authors describe the goals, hardware, software system, and performance of the Firefly, and discuss the extent to which the development has been successful in providing software to take advantage of multiprocessing
Keywords :
buffer storage; multiprocessing systems; performance evaluation; workstations; Firefly shared-memory multiprocessor workstation; Topaz; Ultrix system call interface; VLSI VAX processors; cache; floating-point accelerator; multiple threads of control; multiprocessing; remote procedure call; single address space; threads; Communication system control; Control systems; Distributed computing; Hardware; Process design; Software performance; Software systems; Very large scale integration; Workstations; Yarn;
Journal_Title :
Computers, IEEE Transactions on
