Alewife (multiprocessor)

Alewife was a cache coherent multiprocessor developed in the early 1990s by a group led by Anant Agarwal 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]

  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.
  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, S2CID 14678370.
  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.