Impact of some architectural features of the implementation of a concurrent pascal machine
K.H. Kim, Amir Abou-El-Naga · OSTI OAI (U.S. Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information) · 1982
The concurrent pascal machine (CPM), which is a virtual machine designed to support concurrent processes, was implemented on an 8-bit microcomputer as the beginning step toward constructing a fault-tolerant microcomputer network. The CPM architecture, whose first implementation was based on a PDP 11/45 minicomputer, reflects considerable influence of the PDP 11/45 architecture. The architectural differences between the 16-bit minicomputer and the 8-bit microcomputer which have significant impact on the difficulty of implementing CPMs are analyzed. Then some details on the implementation of the 16-bit virtual machine (CPM) on the 8-bit microcomuter are presented along with some approaches for tuning the CPM architecture to yield more efficient implementations on microcomputers. 7 references.