Berkeley
Hardware Prototypes
Computer Systems
Microprocessors
NOW-2
(1997) 105 Ultra-1 workstations (each with a 167 MHz UltraSPARC micro-
processor, 128 MB of memory, and 2 Seagate Hawk 2 GB 5400 RPM 3.5 inch
disks) connected Myrinet switched system area network with each link operating
at 160 MBytes/second.
[T0 die]T0
(1995) includes a MIPS-II 32-bit integer RISC core, a 1 KB instruction
cache, a fixed-point vector coprocessor, and a 128-bit wide external memory
interface. Fabricated in a 1.0 micron CMOS process, the die measures 280
mm
2, contains 730,701 transistors, and runs at 45 MHz.
Tertiary
Disk (1997) consists of a cluster of 20 PCs which host 396 8.4
GB, 7200 RPM, 3.5-inch IBM disks contained in seven 7-foot high, 19-inch
wide racks. The PCs are P6-200MHz with 96 MB of DRAM each. They run FreeBSD
3.0 and the hosts are connected via switched 100Mbit/second Ethernet.
VLSI-BAM
(1990) is a RISC microprocessor with support for Prolog.
Fabricated in 1.2 micron CMOS the die measures 169 mm
2, contains
112,000 transistors, runs at 20 MHz and consumes 1 Watt at 5 Volts.
RAID-II
(1993) consisted of three racks. The outer two racks contained 144
disks (3.5 inch IBM 320 MB SCSI) and their power supplies. The center rack
contains three chassis: the top chassis holds VME disk controller boards
(Interphase Cougar), the center chassis contains the custom crossbar switch
(XBUS) and HIPPI interface boards; and the bottom chassis contains the
Sun 4/280 workstation. This network attached storage devise was connected
over 100 megabyte over second HIPPI network (UltraNet).
SPUR
chips (1988) This custom chip set enabled a multi- processor
workstation. The processor is 170 mm
2, contains 115,214 transistors,
was fabbed in a 1.6 micron CMOS, and operates at 10 MHz. It contains a
RISC processor designed to run Lisp well. The snooping cache controller
is 130 mm
2 in the same technology and contains 68,385
transistors. The floating point unit is 130 mm
2 in the
same technology and contained about 110,000 transistors.
RAID-I
(1989) consisted of a Sun 4/280 workstation with 128 MB of DRAM, four
dual-string SCSI controllers, 28 5.25-inch SCSI disks and specialized disk
striping software.
SOAR
(1984) A 32-bit RISC chip designed to run Smalltalk. It contains 35,700
transistors, size is 89 mm
2, was fabbed in 4 micron NMOS, dissipates
3W, and runs at 2.5 MHz.
As part of
Project Genie (1964-65), Berkeley adds paged virtual
memory to a SDS 930, which SDS then sells as the SDS 940 in April 1966.
L. Peter Deutsch, Butler Lampson, and Chuck Thacker worked on this as students
of Professor Bob Evans.
RISC-II
(1983) contains 40,760 transistors, was fabbed in 3 micron NMOS, ran
at 3 MHz, and the size is 60 mm
2.
California
Digital Computer (CALDIC) (1951) This easy-to-understand, low-cost
computer was developed by Berkeley students like Doug Englebart and Al
Hoagland, and led by Professor Paul Morton.
RISC-I
(1982) Contains 44,420 transistors, fabbed in 5 micron NMOS, with a
die area of 77 mm
2, ran at 1 MHz. This chip is probably the
first VLSI RISC.
NOW-2 (1997) consists of a cluster of 105
Ultra-1 workstations (each with a 167 MHz UltraSPARC microprocessor, 128
MB of memory, and two Seagate Hawk 2 GB 5400 RPM 3.5 inch disks) running
Solaris 2.6. They are connected by a Myrinet switched system area network
with each link operating at 1 gigabit/second. The prototype consists
of 10 7-foot high racks in two rows. It was constructed by Eric Anderson,
Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau, Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau, Satoshi Asami, Brent Chun,
Adam Costello, Mike Dahlin, Eric Fraser, Douglas Ghormley, Kim Keeton,
Steve Lumetta, Alan Mainwaring, Cedric Krumbein, Lok Liu, Steve Luna, Ken
Lutz, Rich Martin, Jeanna Neefe Matthews, Steve Rodrigues, Drew Roselli,
Nisha Talagala, Amin Vahdat, Keith Vetter, Randy Wang, Frederick Wong,
and Chad Yoshikawa, students and staff of Professors Tom Anderson,
David
Culler, and
David Patterson.
(
NOW retreat
group photo.)
Tertiary Disk (1997) consists of
a cluster of 20 PCs which host 396 8.4 GB, 7200 RPM, 3.5-inch IBM
disks contained in seven 7-foot high, 19-inch wide racks. The PCs are P6-200MHz
with 96 MB of DRAM each. They run FreeBSD 3.0 and the hosts are connected
via switched 100 Mbps Ethernet. All disks are connected to two PCs via
double-ended SCSI chains. The primary application is called the
Zoom
Project, which was the world's largest art image database, with 72,000
images. (Second place in 1998 was 3500 images.) The prototype was constructed
by Satoshi Asami and Nisha Talagala, both students of Professor
David
Patterson. (ZOOM
group photo).
T0 (Torrent-0) (1995
) is a single-chip
fixed-point vector microprocessor designed for multimedia, human-interface,
neural network, and other digital signal processing tasks. T0 includes
a MIPS-II compatible 32-bit integer RISC core, a 1 KB instruction cache,
a high performance fixed-point vector coprocessor, a 128-bit wide external
memory interface, and a byte-serial host interface. Fabricated in a 1.0
micron CMOS process, the die measures 16.75 mm square and contains 730,701
transistors. At the maximum clock frequency of 45 MHz, T0 can simultaneously
sustain 720 million arithmetic operations per second and 720 MByte/s of
external memory bandwidth, with up to 30 MByte/s of DMA I/O. The first
use of T0 is as the core of the
SPERT-II
workstation accelerator board. The core design team that "realized"
T0 include Krste Asanovic, Brian Kingsbury and Bertrand Irissou, all students
of Professor
John Wawrzynek.
RAID-II (1993) consisted three
racks. The outer two racks contained 144 disks (3.5 inch IBM 320 MB SCSI)
and their power supplies. The center rack contains three chassis: the top
chassis holds VME disk controller boards (Interphase Cougar), the center
chassis contains the custom crossbar switch (XBUS) and HIPPI interface
boards; and the bottom chassis contains the Sun 4/280 workstation. This
network attached storage devise was connected over 100 megabyte over second
HIPPI network (UltraNet). It was constructed by Pete Chen, Ann Chevernack,
Ed Lee, Ken Lutz, Ehtan Miller, Srinivasan Seshan, and
Ken Shirriff, students and staff of Professors
Randy
Katz and
David Patterson.
VLSI-BAM (1990), or the VLSI Berkeley Abstract machine. This
is a single-chip RISC processor with extensions to support the programming
language Prolog. Fabricated in 1.2 micron CMOS the die measures 169
mm
2, contains 112,000 transistors, runs at 20 MHz and
consumes 1 Watt at 5 Volts. This chip was designed by Mike Carlton, Bruce
Holmer, Joan Pendleton, Peter Van Roy, and Barton Sano, students and staff
of Professor Alvin Despain. The CAD system essential to making
the chip a reality was done by Charlie Burns and Dave Chenevert.
The BAM processor was built using a technology independent, full custom
CAD system.
RAID-I (1989) consisted of a Sun 4/280
workstation with 128 MB of DRAM, four dual-string SCSI controllers, 28
5.25-inch SCSI disks and specialized disk striping software. This project
coined the term Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID), still in
use today. Our first RAID was constructed by Pete Chen, Ann Drapeau,
Ed Lee, Ken Lutz, Ehtan Miller, Srinivasan Seshan, and
Ken Shirriff, students and staff of Professors
Randy
Katz and
David Patterson.
SPUR chips (1988) This
custom chip set enabled a multiprocessor workstation that ran a custom
operating system (Sprite). The processor is 13 by 13 mm, contains 115,214
transistors, was fabbed in a 1.6 micron CMOS, and operates at 10 MHz. It
contains a RISC processor designed to run Lisp well. The snooping cache
controller is 11.5 by 11.5 mm in the same technology and contained 68,385
transistors. (This group created the term "snoopy" or "snooping" to describe
a multiprocessor cache that looks on shared bus to keep coherent.) The
floating point unit followed the 64-bit IEEE 754 Floating Point Standard.
Its size was also 11.5 by 11.5 mm in the same technology, it contains about
110,000 transistors and ran at 10 MHz or a peak rate of about 3 Megaflops.
They were placed on a
board
inside a workstation from TI. These three chips were designed by B.K. Bose,
Susan Eggers, Garth Gibson, Paul Hansen, D.K. Jeong, Shing Kong, Corinna
Lee, David Lee, Mark Hill, and David Wood students and staff of Professors
David Hodges,
Randy
Katz, and
David Patterson.
SOAR (1984) A 32-bit
RISC chip designed to run Smalltalk. It contains 35,700 transistors, size
is 8.1 mm by 11.0 mm, was fabbed in 4 micron NMOS, dissipates 3W, and runs
at 2.5 MHz. It was designed by
Joan
Pendleton, David Ungar, Shing Kong, Will Brown, Frank Dunlap, and Chris
Marino, students of Professors
David
Hodges and
David Patterson.
(Picture of
Patterson
and Ousterhout.)
RISC-II (1983) contains 40,760
transistors, was fabbed in both 3 micron and 4 micron NMOS, and in 3 micron
the size is 60 mm2, and it ran at 3 MHz. Designed by
Bob
Sherburne and Manolis Katevenis, students of Professors
David
Patterson and Carlo Sequin. (RISC group
picture.)
RISC-I (1982) Contains 44,420 transistors,
fabbed in 5 micron NMOS, with a die area of 77 mm2, ran at 1 MHz. This
project coined the term Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC). This chip
is probably the first VLSI RISC. Designed by
Dan
Fitzpatrick, John Foderaro, Jim Peek, Zvi Peshkess, and Korbin Van
Dyke, students of Professors
David
Patterson and
Carlo Sequin.
The RISC CAD group included
Dan
Fitzpatrick, Professor John Ousterhout, and Howard Landman.
SDS 940 (1964) Scientific Data Systems (SDS) 940 was designed
and implemented at Berkeley as part of
Project Genie. It was subsequently
marketed by SDS as the first commercial time-sharing which allowed user
programming in machine language. About 60 machines were sold, and they
were the initial hardware base for many time-sharing service companies,
including Tymshare. This system was copied directly in the design of the
Tenex system for the PDP-10, except for the memory management. Tenex later
evolved into TOPS-20, the standard operating system for the DecSystem 20.
Some of the 940 system's ideas are also embodied in Unix, whose designer
Ken Thompson worked on the 940 while at Berkeley. Students who worked on
this include Larry Barnes, L. Peter Deutsch, Wayne Lichtenberger, Butler
Lampson, Mel Pirtle, and Chuck Thacker, and were led by Professor
Robert Evans. They modified an SDS 930 which SDS to add the user/OS
protection modes and mapped the 16 K-word address space into 8 2K-word
pages. They also wrote a timeshared operating system for it. (SDS later
sold it as the 940. SDS was later purchased by Xerox, and became XDS.)
The Genie project eventually led to the Berkeley Computer Corporation (BCC).
When BCC faltered, the employees were recruited by Bob Taylor--who had
been the ARPA program manager of Project Genie--to form the core of Xerox
PARC.
California Digital Computer (CALDIC) (1951) Designed for for
the benefit of Berkeley's research, it was a low-cost machine designed
for simplicity of description and operation. This serial machine used a
magnetic drum memory, 1300 vacuum tubes, was a decimal computer with 10
digit words, and it operated at about 50 IPS. The magnetic drum memory
was its outstanding feature, 8 inches in diameter and storing 10,000 10-digit
words (about 400,000 bits). "Practically all of the design and constructions
of the CALDIC is work of graduate and undergraduate students in Electrical
Engineering, some 35 having been associated with the project already."
This group included
Doug
Englebart and
Al
Hoagland, pioneers of the computer and disk industries. (Scanned
photos
and diagrams of CALDIC.)
References
-
Anderson, T.E.; Culler, D.E.; Patterson, D. A case for NOW (Networks of
Workstations). IEEE Micro, vol.15, (no.1), Feb. 1995. p.54-64.
-
Bose, B.K.; Hansen, P.M.; Lee, C.; Patterson, D.A. Fast scientific computation
in CMOS VLSI shared-memory multiprocessors. IEEE International
Symposium on Circuits and Systems. Espoo, Finland, 7-9 June 1988. p.811-14
-
Drapeau, A.L.; Shirriff, K.W.; Hartman, J.H.; Miller,
E.L.; Seshan, S.; Katz, R.H.; Lutz, K.; Patterson, D.A.; Lee, E.K.; Chen,
P.M.; Gibson, G.A. RAID-II: a high-bandwidth
network file server. Proceedings the 21st International Symposium
on Computer Architecture, Chicago, IL, USA, 18-21 April 1994. p.234-44.
-
Gibson, Garth A.. Redundant disk arrays : reliable, parallel secondary
storage, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, c1992. Series title: ACM distinguished
dissertations.
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Hill, M.; Eggers, S.; Larus, J.; Taylor, G.; Adams,
G.; Bose, B.K.; Gibson, G.; Hansen, P.; Keller, J.; Kong, S.; Lee, C.;
Lee, D.; Pendleton, J.; Ritchie, S.; Wood, D.; Zorn, B.; Hilfinger, P.;
Hodges, D.; Katz, R.; Ousterhout, J.; Patterson, D. Design
decisions in SPUR. Computer, vol.19, (no.11), Nov. 1986.
p.8-22.
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Holmer, B.K.; Sano, B.; Carlton, M.; Van Roy, P.; Despain, A.M. Design
and analysis of hardware for high-performance Prolog. Journal
of Logic Programming, vol.29, (no.1-3), Elsevier, Oct.-Dec.1996. p.107-39.
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Jeong, D.-K.; Wood, D.A.; Gibson, G.A.; Eggers, S.J.; Hodges, D.A.; Katz,R.H.;
Patterson, D.A. A VLSI chip set for a multiprocessor workstation. II.
A memory management unit and cache controller. IEEE Journal of Solid-State
Circuits, vol.24, (no.6), Dec. 1989. p.1699-707.
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Katevenis, Manolis G. H.. Reduced instruction set computer architectures
for VLSI, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., c1985 Series title: ACM doctoral
dissertation awards ; 1984.
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Lampson, B.W.; Pirtle, M.W.; and Lichtenberger, W. W. A
user machine in a time-sharing system. Proc. IEEE 54, 12
(Dec. 1966), pp 1766-1774. Reprinted in Computer Structures, ed. Bell and
Newell, McGraw-Hill, 1971, p. 291-300.
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Lee, D.D.; Kong, S.I.; Hill, M.D.; Taylor, G.S.; Hodges,
D.A.; Katz, R.H.; Patterson, D.A. A VLSI chip
set for a multiprocessor workstation. I. A RISC microprocessor with
coprocessor interface and support for symbolic processing. IEEE
Journal of Solid-State Circuits, vol.24, (no.6), Dec. 1989. p.1688-98.
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Morton, Paul L., The
California Digital Computer, Mathematical Tables and Other Aids
to Computation, Vol. 5, No. 34. (Apr., 1951), pp.57-61.
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Patterson, D.A.; Sequin, C.H. A
VLSI RISC. Computer, vol.15, (no.9), Sept. 1982. p.8-21.
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Pendleton, J.M.; Kong, S.I.; Brown, E.W.; Dunlap, F.; Marino, C.; Ungar,
D.M.; Patterson, D.A.; Hodges, D.A. A 32-bit microprocessor for Smalltalk.
IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, vol.SC-21, (no.5), Oct. 1986.
p.741-9.
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Sherburne, R.W., Jr.; Katevenis, M.G.H.; Patterson,
D.A.; Sequin, C.H. A 32-bit NMOS microprocessor
with a large register file. IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits,
vol.SC-19, (no.5), Oct. 1984. p.682-9.
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Ungar, David M.. The design and evaluation of a high performance Smalltalk
system, Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, c1987. Series title: ACM
distinguished dissertations.
-
Ungar, D.; Blau, R.; Foley, P.; Samples, D.; Patterson,
D. Architecture of SOAR: Smalltalk on a RISC.
11th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture, Ann
Arbor, MI, USA, 5-7 June 1984. p.188-97.