ABSTRACT
The Encore Multimax incorporates from 2 to 20 National 32032 32-bit microprocessors, each capable of executing 0.75 million instructions per second (MIPS), with resulting performance scalable from 1.5 to 15 MIPS. The Nanobus provides for fast synchronization between processors and I/O devices with negligible performance effects upon other system activities. The ability to increase processing power, memory size, and I/O throughput by adding modules in an incremental fashion provides a simplified means of upgrading a system. System performance in a Multi is linearly proportional to the number of processors until the bus is saturated with requests for access to main memory. The Ethernet mass storage card provides interface both to the Ethernet and to the small computer system interface bus. The high degree of parallelism in UMAX frees the application programmer from worry about operating system bottlenecks. The principal difficulty in multithreading an operating system is providing controlled, concurrent access to shared resources.
