ABSTRACT
Concert is a tightly coupled, shared-memory multiprocessor consisting of up to 64 processing modules being developed by MIT and Harris Corporation. At the lower levels, the programmer receives less help from library software, but is rewarded with a reduction in overhead and system-imposed conventions. The Concert execution environment may be viewed at several levels, and it is explicitly intended that implementors of programs on Concert should be able to choose among them. At the lowest level, Concert can be thought of as consisting of processors connected to a memory system. A processor interacts with its environment by means of messages sent to other processors, by means of areas of memory shared with other processors, and by means of a serial port that may be connected to a host machine. The code executing on a processor may be viewed as having two components: the bootstrap, which exists in ROM on each processor, and loadable code, which exists in random access memory.
