A porting symbolic dedicated machine by micro program translation

Abstract

AbstractA well‐known technique for inheriting the software resources of computers that were used in the past is to emulate the relevant computer's instructions on a modern computer. One method of using this technique is the static translation method in which the relevant program's binary code is translated in advance and executed. Although this method provides good posttranslation execution performance, each application program must be individually translated. In this paper, the computer's hardware itself is reproduced by statically translating the micro program part of the symbolic processing dedicated machine that had provided the micro program control CPU to the C language, enabling all programs on that dedicated machine to be executed on a UNIX computer. In addition to providing powerful emulation capabilities, translating to the C language enables emulations to be easily executed on computers having different architectures. This paper describes the static translation technique and shows the effectiveness of static micro program translation through static and dynamic performance evaluations of the system that was obtained. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Comp Jpn, 34(9): 105–114, 2003; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/scj.1213