The Makbilan Project at Hebrew University

The Makbilan Project (1989 - 1995)

The goal of the Makbilan project was to provide a platform for research on parallel systems. This was a shared-memory system based on Intel's single-board computers and Multibus-II technology. The Multibus-II allows access to the memory of other boards, but does not support cache coherence. Our research was not so much on the architecture, as on system support and parallel programming.

Major projects performed were


ParC

ParC is a parallel programming language, based on C, for the shared memory programming model. Its main feature is the use of the block structure of the language to define the scope of shared variables. The main language constructs (apart from thos of C) are The parallel constructs, parblock and parfor, can be nested within each other, and also combined with conventional C constructs such as branching and loops. The nesting results in a tree of activities, in which internal nodes are activities that are blocked waiting for their children to complete, and leaves are active.

There were also some more sophisticated constructs that allow for performance optinization and the mapping of activities to processors.

The development of ParC was continued for some time by its original author, Yosi Ben Asher, at Haifa University.

MAXI

MAXI stands for the makbilan system. This runtime system was based on Intel's RMK real-time kernel that ran on each node. Its main function was to support the constructs of the ParC programming language, as follows:

In addition, versions with some special features were created, including

Sim-ParC

This is a simulator for ParC that runs on a single PC.

Interconnection

Three additional interconnection mechanisms were constructed:

We also have a Makbilan photo album (total about 203 KB)


Publications


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