The PowerNode 9080 was a dual processor
32-bit
In computer architecture, 32-bit computing refers to computer systems with a processor, memory, and other major system components that operate on data in a maximum of 32- bit units. Compared to smaller bit widths, 32-bit computers can perform la ...
Superminicomputer
A superminicomputer, colloquially supermini, is a high-end minicomputer. The term is used to distinguish the emerging 32-bit architecture midrange computers introduced in the mid to late 1970s from the classical 16-bit systems that preceded them ...
produced by
Fort Lauderdale
Fort Lauderdale ( ) is a coastal city located in the U.S. state of Florida, north of Miami along the Atlantic Ocean. It is the county seat of and most populous city in Broward County with a population of 182,760 at the 2020 census, making it ...
,
Florida
Florida ( ; ) is a U.S. state, state in the Southeastern United States, Southeastern region of the United States. It borders the Gulf of Mexico to the west, Alabama to the northwest, Georgia (U.S. state), Georgia to the north, the Atlantic ...
based electronics company
Gould Electronics
Gould Electronics Inc. was a manufacturer of electronics and batteries that branched into other fields before being partially absorbed in 1988 by Nippon Mining (now JX Holdings) and closed by them in 2014. The company had it's origins in seve ...
in the 1980s.
Its UTX/32 4.3BSD
Berkeley Unix-based operating system was one of the first multi-processor shared memory implementations of Unix, although the processors operated in a Master-Slave configuration with a Mutual Exclusion (
MutEx
In computer science, a lock or mutex (from mutual exclusion) is a synchronization primitive that prevents state from being modified or accessed by multiple threads of execution at once. Locks enforce mutual exclusion concurrency control policies, ...
) lock on all manipulations on
Kernel
Kernel may refer to:
Computing
* Kernel (operating system), the central component of most operating systems
* Kernel (image processing), a matrix used for image convolution
* Compute kernel, in GPGPU programming
* Kernel method, in machine learnin ...
tables. The second processor, called IPU, left all I/O operations to the main CPU. Machines could be configured for either single or dual processor operation. At launch in the mid-eighties the PowerNode 9080 was sold at $385,000.
The machine itself was housed in a number of 19 inch rack cabinets and the main
CPUs
A central processing unit (CPU), also called a central processor, main processor, or just processor, is the primary Processor (computing), processor in a given computer. Its electronic circuitry executes Instruction (computing), instructions ...
consisted of 18 boards of ECL logic. The resulting system was capable of benchmark performances up to 10
MIPS, a very high rating at the time.
The PowerNode systems were a very close relative of Gould Concept-32
real time computer systems running their proprietary
MPX real time operating system. Only about two boards differed between PowerNode machines running Unix and the real-time versions running MPX. The most significant of these was the Memory Management board which had
virtual memory
In computing, virtual memory, or virtual storage, is a memory management technique that provides an "idealized abstraction of the storage resources that are actually available on a given machine" which "creates the illusion to users of a ver ...
mapping abilities in the Unix variant but not in the real-time variant.
A smaller model of the PowerNode was also available in the form of the Gould PowerNode 6032 and 6040 single processor systems and 6080 dual CPU which achieved a 7
MIPS performance similar to the contemporary DEC
VAX-11/780
The VAX-11 is a discontinued family of 32-bit superminicomputers, running the Virtual Address eXtension (VAX) instruction set architecture (ISA), developed and manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Development began in 1976. In ad ...
and
VAX-11/785.
The PowerNode series was replaced by the Gould NP-1 series. When Gould was purchased by Nippon Mining, the computer division was divested on the instructions of the US Government for National Security concerns and became part of
Encore Computer
Encore Computer Corporation was an American computer company independently active from 1983 to 1997. Based in Marlborough, Massachusetts, the company was an early pioneer in the parallel computing market. Although offering several system designs ...
.
References
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Minicomputers