Alewife (multiprocessor)

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"APRIL" redirects here. See April (disambiguation) for other uses.

Alewife was a cache coherent multiprocessor developed in the early 1990s at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[1][2] It was based on a network of up to 512 processing nodes, each of which used the Sparcle computer architecture,[3] which was formed by modifying a Sun Microsystems SPARC CPU to include the APRIL techniques for fast context switches.[4]

The Alewife project was one of two predecessors cited by the creators of the popular Beowulf cluster multiprocessor.[5]

[edit] References

  1. ^ Agarwal, A.; Chaiken, D.; Johnson, K.; Kranz, D.; Kubiatowicz, J.; Kurihara, K.; Lim, B. H.; Maa, G.; et al. (1991), The MIT Alewife Machine: A Large-Scale Distributed-Memory Multiprocessor, Tech. Report TM-454, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, <http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=889587> .
  2. ^ Agarwal, A.; Bianchini, R.; Chaiken, D.; Chong, F. T.; Johnson, K. L.; Kranz, D.; Kubiatowicz, J. D.; Lim, Beng-Hong; et al. (1999), “The MIT Alewife Machine”, Proceedings of the IEEE 87 (3): 430–444, DOI 10.1109/5.747864 .
  3. ^ Agarwal, Anant; Kubiatowicz, John; Kranz, David; Lim, Beng-Hong; Yeung, Donald; D'Souza, Godfrey & Parkin, Mike (1993), “Sparcle: An Evolutionary Processor Design for Large-Scale Multiprocessors”, IEEE Micro 13 (3): 48–61, DOI 10.1109/40.216748 .
  4. ^ Agarwal, A.; Lim, B.-H.; Kranz, D. & Kubiatowicz, J. (1990), “APRIL: a processor architecture for multiprocessing”, Proc. 17th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA 1990), pp. 104–114, DOI 10.1109/ISCA.1990.134498 .
  5. ^ Sterling, Thomas; Becker, Donald J.; Savarese, Daniel; Dorband, John E.; Ranawake, Udaya A. & Packer, Charles V. (1995), “Beowulf: A parallel workstation for scientific computing”, Proc. 24th Int. Conf. Parallel Processing, vol. I, pp. 11–14, <http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/sterling95beowulf.html> .

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