The STAB multiprocessing environment for CYBA‐M

Abstract

AbstractMulti‐Thread STAB is an implementation of the notional STAB stack machine1,2 on the CYBA‐M multi‐microprocessor.3–5 Designed expressly for the study of synchronization and performance issues within multiprocessing, the MTS system comprises a highly interactive user interface and multiple program‐gated clocks which, respectively, control and monitor the execution of a STAB kernel. This provides a flexible high‐level environment within which multiple processor STAB programs may be run and analysed in terms of effective concurrency, sequential flow of control and interprocessor synchronization.The MTS kernel is a re‐entrant STAB interpreter which can simultaneously support any number of 8080 processors, thereby implementing a notional STAB multiprocessor. The STAB processors communicate by access to common global data structures, and primitive binary semaphore operations are available to provide both simple and conditional mutual exclusion in critical regions. Any of the proposed schemes for controlled process interaction6–10 may be implemented on the basis of these fundamental means for communication and synchronization. This provides a useful framework within which general high level multiprocessing control structures may be investigated, and also allows special structures to be created for optimized harnessing of concurrency in specific areas of applications research.