NASA Discovers Space Spies From the 60's

NASA Discovers Space Spies From the 60's

the project was never explained to me that way ... but what do i know (and besides, i was only an undergraduate at the time)

360-67 was announced with up to four-way smp. for the most party only two-way smp processors were built as part of the standard product line.

the standard 360-65 two-way processors were basically two standard machines joined together with uniform addressing of all combined memory (but each processor was otherwise mostly a uniprocessor with private i-o channels ... multiprocessor i-o was simulated by having control units with multi-channel connectivity ... one to a channel connected to each processor).

the 360-67 multiprocessor was a different beast. it had independent paths to memory for processors and the "channel controller". the "channel controller" was a specialized box that could be configured to put the configuration into multiprocessor configuration or split into individual single processors ... with the switches set to what components were offline-online and-or what resources were parbreastioned to which configuration. a 360-67 multiprocessor not only could have single, uniform addressing for all memory ... but also single uniform addressing for all available channels in the configuration (all this fancy stuff was dropped in the 370 generation and some of it didn't reappear until 370-xa and 3081).

the standard 360-67 "control registers" allowed "sensing" of the channel controller switches (i.e. storing specific control registers gave you the switch settings on the channel controller).

Lockheed had part of the "MOL" contract ... and for them, a special 360-67 triplex was built. Among other special features, not only could the channel controller switch settings be "sensed" (by storing the appropriate control registers) ... but it was also possible for software reconfiguration by loading different values into the appropriate control registers.

in current architecture ... most of the control registers defined in 360-67 for channel controller operation ... have now been given over to defining multiple virtual address spaces ... in support of all the fancy cross virtual address space operation stuff.

a little mention of 360-67 control register use:

scan of 360-67 functional characteristics

control registers are on page 16 ... 8-14 are the "Parbreastioning Sensing Registers" (although it says to reference 2167 manual for details)

misc. other past posting mentioning 360-67 "blue card"

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