In a multiprocessing environment context switch plays an important role in the overall performance of the system. The context switch latency affects the execution time of a process. In this paper we propose certain architectural modifications to reduce context switch latency. A dedicated hardware unit performs context switching operations with the help of Shadow Register File, simultaneously du...

We present a runtime environment that implements a Java Virtual Machine by co-execution between the different functional units of the heterogeneous Cell multiprocessing platform. Our approach uses the Cell’s scratchpad memory as a software-controlled cache and contains an automatic software-based memory management system for instruction and data caching. Profiling shows a cache hit rate of abov...

Creating dramatic narratives for real-time virtual reality environments is complicated by the lack of temporal distance between the occurrence of an event and its telling in the narrative. This paper describes the application of a multiprocessing operating system architecture to the creation of adaptive narratives, narratives that use autonomous actors or agents to create real-time dramatic exp...

With the increasing demand for solving more complex problems, high-performance multiprocessing systems are attracting more and more research efforts. One of the challenges is to effectively support the communications among the processes running in parallel on the multiprocessors. Due to the physical limitations of electrical interconnects, interconnection networks impose a potential bottleneck ...

This paper is concerned with the choice of the appropriate programming model for clusters of symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) machines. Software vendors who wish to take advantage of cluster-based multiprocessing can either support message passing, hardware shared memory, or shared memory on top of a DSM runtime system. Software vendors entering the marketplace are similarly faced with the diffic...

1 Abstract DEC 4000 AXP systems demonstrate the highest performance and functionality for Digital's 4000 series of departmental server systems. DEC 4000 AXP systems are based on Digital's Alpha AXP architecture and the IEEE's Futurebus+ profile B standard. They provide symmetric multiprocessing performance for OpenVMS AXP and DEC OSF/1 AXP operating systems in an office environment. The DEC 400...

LabFlow is a workflow management system designed for large scale biology research laboratories. It provides a workflow model in which objects flow from task to task under programmatic control. The model supports parallelism, meaning that an object can flow down several paths simultaneously, and sub-workflows which can be invoked subroutine-style from a task. The system allocates tasks to Unix p...

Multi-core processors are widely used today. So what is the usual technology in these processors and what is state-of-the-art? This report provides an insight into the development of multi-processors, shown by the following three examples: AMD K10 and Intel Core are examples of end-user hardware and the IBM POWER6 microarchitecture is an example of high-end hardware. In addition, this report gi...

Using the system architects’ specified memory ordering as a function of execution, a multiprocessing system can be verified by monitoring not only that the result of an execution conforms to the required memory model, but that the result is exactly what the system architects intended. This allows a much more thorough verification of the system implementation, because in typical simulations many...

Multiprocessing programming languages must support the styles of programming that are natural to the programmer, and they must be able to express all of the forms of concurrency that exist. Qlisp, a dialect of Lisp, is proposed as a multiprocessing programming language which is suitable for studying the styles of parallel programming. There are two sorts of parallelism in Qlisp: 1) the true par...