We developed a SPARC-V9 processor, the SPARC64 V. It has an operating frequency of 1.35 GHz and contains 191 million transistors fabricated using 0.13-µm CMOS technology with eight-layer copper metallization. SPECjbb2000 (CPU# 32) is 492683, highest on the market and 42% higher than the next highest system. SPEC CPU2000 performance is 858 for SPECint and 1228 for SPECfp. The processor is designed to provide the high system performance and high reliability required of enterprise server systems. It is also designed to address the performance requirements of high-performance computing. During our development of several generations of mainframe processors, we conducted many related experiments, and obtained enterprise server system (EPS) development skills, an understanding of EPS workload characteristics, and technology that provides high reliability, availability, and serviceability. We used those as bases of the new processor development. The approach quite effectively moves beyond differences between mainframe and SPARC systems. At the beginning of development and before the start of hardware design, we developed a software performance simulator so we could understand the performance impacts of created specifications, thereby enabling us to make appropriate decisions about hardware design. We took this approach to solve performance problems before tape-out and avoid spending additional time on design update and physical machine reconstruction. We were successful, completing the high-performance processor development on schedule and in a short time. This paper describes the SPARC64 V microprocessor and performance analyses for development of its design.

Recent attractive high-speed networks require network file servers with high-speed read performance to deliver huge multimedia files, like voice or movie files. This paper proposes new design and implementation techniques that yield high-speed file servers based on UNIX. The techniques are request reduction, in which contiguous blocks on UNIX file system (UFS) are gathered for reducing the number of command requests from the file system to the device driver, and a direct access method for cutting through the buffer cache mechanism. A file server prototype based on a general-purpose personal computer (PC) is constructed and its performance is evaluated. The preliminary results show that the prototype achieves high-speed file read performance in excess of 100 Mbytes/s even on an OpenBSD PC-UNIX system with 3 RAID controllers and 9 hard drives in RAID level 0 configuration.

The fault tolerant computer (FTC) is applied as a communication or database server in the information service and computer aided process control fields. User requires of the FTC are to provide the current level of performance and software transparency needing no additional dedicated program for fault tolerance. To meet these requirements, we propose quadprocessor redundancy (QPR) architecture that combines dualRISC based duplicated CPUs integrating main memories, and duplicated I/O subsystems by using some additional hardware. Duplicated CPUs run under the instruction level synchronization (lock step operation) , and the duplicated I/O subsystems are managed by an operating system. When a fault is detected, the faulty CPU is isolated by hardware. User program is continuously executed by the remaining CPU. We applied the QPR to our UNIX servers, and achieved satisfactory levels of performance.

In general, multimedia files are much larger than ordinary text files because they consist of multiple monomedia. In order to process large multimedia files in real time, the file system must be able to store and access files efficiently. In th UNIX s5 file system, a multimedia file may be scattered into many disk blocks over the entire disk space, and accessing a multimedia file requires a considerable amount of time for random disk head movement. This paper proposes the internal structure of a multimedia file and its inode which is modified from UNIX s5 file system's. Also, we propose a mechanism for allocating and deallocating contiguous disk blocks for large multimedia files using the bitmap tree and compares its performance with that of the UNIX s5 file system. Our results show that the proposed mechanism reduces considerably the number of disk I/Os required to allocate and deallocate contiguous disk blocks. It also reduces the total access time for large multimedia files by approximately 95% due to the contiguous allocation of disk spaces.

In the course of the development of the "Hyper Hospital," a novel medical care system constructed in the computerized information network using virtual reality as its human interface, we devised a virtual reality world creating system which allows users to con figure the world interactively. The re-configuration of the virtual world was designed to be carried out without interruptions of activity and the world can continue to exist during the reconfiguration process. This facility comprises an important part of our Hyper Hospital system because one of our major goals of this proposal of the Hyper Hospital is to restore maximum freedom for patients in the medical care system. Discussion was given in the present study with respect to the basic requirements of the system to be realized, including discussions on the permission given to the participants of different levels, and means by which to modify the structure of the virtual world. A preliminary implementation was described following this general consideration. The developed prototype was shown to be practically suitable to the test of our virtual environment applied to realistic medical scenes.

The access control method adopted by UNIX is simple, understandable, and useful. However, it is quite possible that unexpected information flows occur when we are cooperating with some group members on UNIX. Introducing notions such as "flow right," "maximal permission" and "minimal umask value", this note proposes a simple method, can be seen as a natural extension of UNIX, to control indirect information flows without losing availability and understandability of UNIX.