System architecture and protection mechanisms of the MUTEAM multimicroprocessor

MuTEAM is a multimicroprocessor system, being developed in Pisa under the support of the National Computer Science Program of the Italian National Research Council /1/. The system is composed of several Computer Elements (essentially constituted of a processor and some memory), which are grouped in clusters o The Computer Elements of the same cluster communicate through a shared memory space, which is utilized for obtaining a fast message transmission among processes. The shared space is segmented, and a protection mechanism is provided, which associates an access control list to each segment: the list of a given segment specifies the access rights of each processor of the cluster on that segment. In this paper, the MuTEAM system architecture and protection mechanisms are described in some detail. The provided fault treatment strategy and the operating system kernel are related in /2/ and /3/, respectively.