Lesson plan
Powernode 9080
The PowerNode 9080 was a dual processor 32-bit superminicomputer produced by Fort Lauderdale, Florida based electronics company Gould Electronics 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) lock on all manipulations on Kernel 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 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 mapping abilities in the Unix variant but not in the real-time variant.…
Article summary
The PowerNode 9080 was a dual processor 32-bit superminicomputer produced by Fort Lauderdale, Florida based electronics company Gould Electronics 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) lock on all manipulations on Kernel 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 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 mapping abilities in the Unix variant but not in the real-time variant.…
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Discussion questions
- Summarise the article in your own words. Which single claim would you verify first, and why?
- Which claim in this article is most likely to be revised as the sources update? How would you check its current status?
- If two sources disagreed about one of these facts, what would you need in order to trust one over the other?
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Key claims and bibliography are generated from the same tracked claims and sources as the article page.