Alewife (multiprocessor)
Encyclopedia
Alewife was a cache coherent
multiprocessor
developed in the early 1990s by a group led by Anant Agarwal
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
. It was based on a network of up to 512 processing nodes, each of which used the Sparcle computer architecture, which was formed by modifying a Sun Microsystems
SPARC
CPU to include the APRIL techniques for fast context switch
es.
The Alewife project was one of two predecessors cited by the creators of the popular Beowulf cluster
multiprocessor.
Cache coherency
In computing, cache coherence refers to the consistency of data stored in local caches of a shared resource.When clients in a system maintain caches of a common memory resource, problems may arise with inconsistent data. This is particularly true of CPUs in a multiprocessing system...
multiprocessor
Multiprocessor
Computer system having two or more processing units each sharing main memory and peripherals, in order to simultaneously process programs.Sometimes the term Multiprocessor is confused with the term Multiprocessing....
developed in the early 1990s by a group led by Anant Agarwal
Anant Agarwal
Anant Agarwal is a computer architecture researcher. He is a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has also founded the Tilera corporation....
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...
. It was based on a network of up to 512 processing nodes, each of which used the Sparcle computer architecture, which was formed by modifying a Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold :computers, computer components, :computer software, and :information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982...
SPARC
SPARC
SPARC is a RISC instruction set architecture developed by Sun Microsystems and introduced in mid-1987....
CPU to include the APRIL techniques for fast context switch
Context switch
A context switch is the computing process of storing and restoring the state of a CPU so that execution can be resumed from the same point at a later time. This enables multiple processes to share a single CPU. The context switch is an essential feature of a multitasking operating system...
es.
The Alewife project was one of two predecessors cited by the creators of the popular Beowulf cluster
Beowulf (computing)
A Beowulf cluster is a computer cluster of what are normally identical, commodity-grade computers networked into a small local area network with libraries and programs installed which allow processing to be shared among them...
multiprocessor.