Firefly: a multiprocessor workstation

Author

Thacker, C.P. ; Stewart, Lawrence C. ; Satterthwaite, Edwin H., Jr.

Author_Institution

Digital Equipment Corp., Palo Alto, CA, USA

Volume

37

Issue

8

fYear

1988

fDate

8/1/1988 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

909

Lastpage

920

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;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Computers, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0018-9340

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/12.2243

Filename

2243