MPP Possibility (Was: Notice)

From: Frank McConnell <fmc_at_reanimators.org>
Date: Sun Aug 26 14:19:18 2001

"Bill Sudbrink" <bills_at_adrenaline.com> wrote:
> The University Of Maryland had something called ZMOB or
> Z-MOB in the early 1980s, which (if memory serves) was
> 256 4MHz Z80s, several Megs of bank-switched memory, etc.
> I never got to actually play with it or even see it,
> only heard about it. Frank McConnell may know more.

IIRC the big deal about ZMOB was that there was a sort of circular
ring shifter that was used for message passing between processors. If
processsor x wanted to send a message to processor y, processor x
would put its message into the currently accessible ring bucket and
the bucket's contents would eventually get shifted around to where it
was accessible to processor y. I don't think there was any pretense
of ZMOB being "super", just "parallel", but that was sufficiently
interesting for CS research.

But I never worked on it, I think I saw it once (a bunch of boards in
rack-mounted cages, in a rack with a door), and I can't remember where
I learned about it. Maybe one of the courses I took, maybe a friend
who I think did hack on it a bit.

-Frank McConnell
Received on Sun Aug 26 2001 - 14:19:18 BST