Alewife was a
cache coherent multiprocessor
Multiprocessing is the use of two or more central processing units (CPUs) within a single computer system. The term also refers to the ability of a system to support more than one processor or the ability to allocate tasks between them. There ar ...
developed in the early 1990s by a group led by
Anant Agarwal
Anant Agarwal is an Indian computer architecture researcher. He is a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he led the development of Alewife, an early cache cohere ...
at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...
. 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
SPARC (Scalable Processor Architecture) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture originally developed by Sun Microsystems. Its design was strongly influenced by the experimental Berkeley RISC system develope ...
CPU to include the APRIL techniques for fast
context switches.
The Alewife project was one of two predecessors cited by the creators of the popular
Beowulf cluster
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. The result is a hi ...
multiprocessor.
[.]
References
External links
MIT Alewife Project*
Parallel computing
Cluster computing
SPARC microprocessor architecture
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