Alewife (multiprocessor)

:"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. [citation|title=The MIT Alewife Machine: A Large-Scale Distributed-Memory Multiprocessor|last1=Agarwal|first1=A.|first2=D.|last2=Chaiken |first3=K.|last3=Johnson | first4=D.|last4=Kranz |first5=J.|last5=Kubiatowicz |first6=K.|last6=Kurihara |first7=B. H.|last7=Lim |first8=G.|last8=Maa |first9=D.|last9=Nussbaum |first10=M.|last10=Parkin |first11=D.|last11=Yeung|publisher=Massachusetts Institute of Technology|series=Tech. Report TM-454|year=1991|url=http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=889587.] [citation|title=The MIT Alewife Machine|last1=Agarwal|first1= A. |last2=Bianchini|first2= R.|last3= Chaiken|first3= D.|last4=Chong|first4=F. T.|last5= Johnson|first5= K. L.|last6= Kranz|first6= D.|last7= Kubiatowicz|first7= J. D.|first8= Beng-Hong |last8=Lim |last9= Mackenzie|first9= K.|last10=Yeung|first10= D.|journal=Proceedings of the IEEE|volume=87|issue=3|year=1999|doi=10.1109/5.747864|pages=430–444.] It was based on a network of up to 512 processing nodes, each of which used the Sparcle computer architecture, [citation|title=Sparcle: An Evolutionary Processor Design for Large-Scale Multiprocessors |journal=IEEE Micro|volume=13|issue=3|year=1993|pages=48–61|first1=Anant|last1=Agarwal|first2=John|last2=Kubiatowicz |first3=David|last3=Kranz|first4=Beng-Hong|last4=Lim|first5=Donald|last5=Yeung|first6=Godfrey|last6=D'Souza|first7=Mike|last7=Parkin |doi=10.1109/40.216748.] which was formed by modifying a Sun Microsystems SPARC CPU to include the APRIL techniques for fast context switches. [citation|last1=Agarwal|first1=A.|last2=Lim|first2=B.-H.|last3=Kranz|first3=D.|last4=Kubiatowicz|first4=J.|year=1990| doi=10.1109/ISCA.1990.134498|contribution=APRIL: a processor architecture for multiprocessing|pages=104–114|title=Proc. 17th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA 1990).]

The Alewife project was one of two predecessors cited by the creators of the popular Beowulf cluster multiprocessor. [citation|contribution=Beowulf: A parallel workstation for scientific computing|first1=Thomas|last1=Sterling|first2=Donald J.|last2=Becker|first3=Daniel|last3=Savarese|first4=John E.|last4=Dorband|first5=Udaya A.|last5=Ranawake|first6=Charles V.|last6=Packer|title=Proc. 24th Int. Conf. Parallel Processing|volume=I|pages=11–14|year=1995|url=http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/sterling95beowulf.html.]

References

External links

* [http://www.cag.csail.mit.edu/alewife/ MIT Alewife Project]