NORD-50

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The NORD-50 computer system is a completely integrated system of NORD-10/S and NORD-50 CPUs. The I/O system, file system and operating system are common to both processors.

The NORD-50 CPU is designed to be a fast floating point processor which is a total slave to the NORD-10/S.

NORD-50 does not have an I/O system or interrupt system by itself. This implies that NORD-10/S submits jobs to NORD-50 for execution in batches and acts as a system supervisor running the operating system SINTRAN III/VS and the NORD-50 monitor.

In a NORD-50 computer system, the NORD-10/S has the following functions:

• Supervision and synchronization of the NORD-50s in the system.
• Running the operating system, SINTRAN III.
• Generating NORD-50 executable machine code via NORD-50 assembler or FORTRAN compiler.
• Being the I/O system for the NORD-50s performing I/O transfer to / from the NORD-50 memory.

The NORD-50s in the system perform execution of instructions with data supplied through the NORD-10/S I/O system from byte oriented devices such as terminals, general DMA devices such as disks and magnetic tapes, the universal DMA interface, and special high-speed DMA channels connected directly to ports in the multiport memory system.

The system architecture is such that NORD-50s can have their private memories including a high speed static memory in addition to the multiport memory system.

The NORD-50s themselves do not perform any tasks except for running the application programs.

The slave processor NORD-50 is activated by the NORD-10/S and NORD-50 executes programs in parallel with the activities in NORD-10/S. The NORD-10/S is interrupted when the NORD-50 comes to an end of its tasks.

CPU

The NORD-50 CPU has a word length of 32 bits.

Address space

The NORD-50 has a 4 megabytes physical address space.

Circuit Boards

Main registers and arithmetic, communication registers NORD-10/NORD-50, memory address and data lines, line drivers for external arithmetic are organised on three different boads, each handling four bits:

• 1501 Address Arithmetic
• 1502 Register
• 1503 Arithmetic Buffer

The 32 bit CPU uses eight of each board, making a total of 24 boards.

The timing and control section of the CPU uses eight different boards:

• 1500 NORD-50 I/O Control
• 1504 NORD-50 Controller
• 1505 Register Address
• 1506 Cycle Counter
• 1507 Arithmetic Control
• 1508 Chip Select
• 1510 Instruction Control
• 1519 Timing Control

Performance

Whetstone results

MWIPS	MWIPS double precision	Language	Date
0.531	0.451	Fortran	1975

Related

NORD-50 (command)

NORD-50 monitor