The communication processor of TUMULT-64

Tumult (Twente University MULTi-processor system) is a modular extendible multi-processor system designed and implemented at the Twente University of Technology in co-operation with Oce Nederland B.V. and the Dr. Neher Laboratories (Dutch PTT). Characteristics of the hardware are: MIMD type, distributed memory, message passing, high performance, real-time and fault tolerant. A distributed real-time operating system has been realized, consisting of a multi-tasking kernel per node, inter process communication via typed messages and a distributed file system. In this paper first a brief description of the system is given, after that the architecture of the communication processor will be discussed. Reduction of the communication overhead due to message passing will be emphasized.