NORD-50

From Computer History Wiki
Revision as of 12:59, 6 August 2017 by Tingo (talk | contribs) (created NORD-50 page)
(diff) ← Older revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)
Jump to: navigation, search


NORD-50
Manufacturer: Norsk Data
Year Introduced: 1971
Form Factor: mini
Word Size: 32 bit
Physical Address Size: 4 megabytes

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 was used in the ND 1100/S, ND 1200/S, ND 1300/S and ND 1400/S systems.

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, all I/O is done through the NORD-10/S which submits jobs to NORD-50 for execution in batches. The NORD-10 acts as a system supervisor running the operating system SINTRAN III/VS and the NORD-50 monitor.

n 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.

To the NORD-10 the NORD-50 looks like any else device and is controlled via standard IOX instructions.

References

NDWiki: NORD-50