[comp.arch] Cray - XMP article summary

levisonm@qucis.queensu.CA (Mark Levison) (05/03/89)

    This is the summary of articles concerning the Cray - XMP that
I promised a few months ago.  Thanks to everybody who replied.  The
Best reading comes from either the Hwang and Briggs article or the
Chen article for a summary and then the Jan 89 IEEE Computer article
which discusses the design issues (it would be neat to see the same
for the Cray-3 but that will have to wait a while).  If any one is
intrested I wrote a short (10 pg) paper discussing the XMP and will
be happy to mail it to anyone who wants a copy.  N.B. The paper is
marked up with DCF but will probably survive an [nt]roff formatter.
Further I never did find a copy of the interview in our issues of
Electronic News but I did discover that someone (I think IEEE) has
video of it.  I managed to find copies of all the other articles.

See the article in the Jan 1989 IEEE COMPUTER, which contains six articles
describing design decisions behind six computers, including the Cray X-MP.

                                        (-:  Brad Brown  :-)
                                        bradb@ai.toronto.edu

Recently, Seymour cray gave an interview at the ISSC or some parallelism
conference or something.  Anyway, it was written up in Electronics News
about 1-2 months ago.  First interview in 7 years, including lots of
info on Seymour's life, and quips about what will be in the Cray-3,
Cray-4, and Cray-5 ("The Cray-5 design will definitely be biological").

That article might be a way of spicing up your report.

Don

Larson's IEEE Computer Paper is a reasonable general
reference.

--eugene

Steve S. Chen, "Large scale and high-speed multiprocessor system
for scientific applications - Cray X-MP series" Proc. of Nato
Advanced rsearch worklshop on high speed computation [ ed. J. Kowalik ]
Springer Verlag, Julich, W.Germany, June '83.

Regards                                               Manoharan.


        See Jan. 1989 IEEE Computer Magazine.

                                                        -Jonathan

The current article of one of the big IEEE magazines has a long story
on the development of the X-MP.  It's something like "IEEE Computer".
The cover indicates that the feature stories are five or six stories on
the developments of individual architectures.

  -=- Andrew Klossner   (uunet!tektronix!hammer!frip!andrew)    [UUCP]
                        (andrew%frip.gwd.tek.com@relay.cs.net)  [ARPA]

Cornelius,H.U. "Some Timings for Synchronization on the Multiprocessor
System CRAY X-MP", in Parallel Computing 85, North-Holland,pp.457-462,1986.

Barry Maher

Briggs and Hwang "Computer Archietecture and Parallel Processing" (approx)
- good summary, based mostly on the Chen article

Anyway Thanks again

Mark Levison
levisonm@qucis.queensu.ca