4 ms·
I must correct myself, after a visit to moar of the Internets. Looks like the 1st versions of nCube ran Arix (perhaps shortened to IX), a Unix clone) on a 286
by sillywalk 3y ago
I must correct myself, after a visit to moar of the Internets.
Looks like the 1st versions of nCube ran Arix (perhaps shortened to IX), a Unix clone) on a 286 which was the front end and controlled the actual processing elements, and IO. Each compute node ran a 4KB kernel called Vertex[0].
The 2nd version had a Sun Workstation as the front-end and the nodes ran an a 200 KB microkernel called nCX[1]
The nCube 3 / mediaCube nodes ran Transit[2] (hurray for archive.org! )
" Transit is the operating system that runs on each node of the MediaCUBE system. Based on AT&T;'s Plan 9 Unix derivative, it's light-weight microkernel architecture provides a small footprint that minimizes memory consumption. Transit's features include:
Streamlined internal code paths
Hypercube communications software
Algorithms optimized for hardware
Flexibility of UNIX-like environment
Optimized for Oracle Video Server
High performance
Reliability
Transit is used to distribute content processing across interconnected CPU and I/O modules, interface to hardware devices, and manage the Oracle Video Server processes on each node. Transit also provides a file service, u9fs, that creates a special file hierarchy on the system console available to processes running on the MediaCUBE processors. This provides access to non-video files."[2]
And an overview of mediaCube [3].
[0] http://tnm.engin.umich.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/353/2017/12/1986.10.A-Microprocessor-based-Hypercube-Supercomputer_IEEE_Micro.pdf http://tnm.engin.umich.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/353/2017...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NCUBE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NCUBE
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/19970204220447/http://www.ncube.com/products/transit.html https://web.archive.org/web/19970204220447/http://www.ncube....
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/19970204220335/http://www.ncube.com/products/techover.html https://web.archive.org/web/19970204220335/http://www.ncube....