minicomputers
Systems Engineering Laboratories, Inc. [SEL]
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This was a 50 ns ECL gate array 32 bit machine designed by chief architect Bill Ward.
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Completely programmable, including I/O and memory, it used a PC to load the firmware into each part of the system.
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Memory mapped I/O with double linked lists, with interrupts to the least busy processor.
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All I/O controllers capable of CPU emulation.
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Multiprocessor UNIX available
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Custom interfaces included a 100Mbps interface to Cray XMP
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Reflective memory:
Provides three major benefits to real-time applications.
1. Solves a problem that causes non-deterministic operation due to random blocking of program execution caused by memory access contention. There is no overhead for memory access with Reflective Memory because writes to memory are automatically distributed to other connected systems by hardware. Memory reads are executed on the local memory, therefore, eliminating any memory access contention delays.
2. Elimination of contention for a shared resource gives determinism (predictable execution speed) to all application software.
3. Data reflection is automatic, concurrent and passive, requiring zero additional application software cycles to update all systems that share the common data.