Dr. Scott M. Baker has constructed a supercomputer, of types, which places eight processors to work churning by Conway’s Sport of Life — although as they’re all Intel 8008s, efficiency is not precisely excessive by trendy requirements.
“I have been trying to do a parallel computing mission for some time,” Baker explains of the mission, which blends extra trendy parallel processing with a few of Intel’s first eight-bit CPUs. “I’ve toyed round with a number of totally different concepts — every little thing from 8086 to Z8000. However currently I had carried out just a few 8008 CPU tasks and I made a decision to lastly take the multiprocessor leap and design myself a small multiprocessor pc.”
The ensuing design, dubbed MasterBlaster for causes which is able to turn out to be clear, is predicated round eight Intel 8008 CPUs. First launched in 1972, the 8008 is an eight-bit design clocked at between 500kHz and 800kHz — and sure, that is kilohertz, not megahertz — able to addressing simply 16kB of reminiscence. Made up of a mere 3,500 transistors, it is a machine dwarfed by even the most cost effective of contemporary microcontrollers let alongside Intel’s present output — nevertheless it stays an fascinating piece of historical past, notably owing to its place in Intel’s improvement of the still-extant x86 structure.
Contemporaneous techniques constructed with the Intel 8008 sometimes used only one, however Baker’s design makes use of eight. Because the machine wasn’t made with symmetric multiprocessing in thoughts, the retro-themed “supercomputer” is break up into seven “brawn” units and one “mind” machine — named Blaster and Grasp respectively, for the characters within the post-apocalyptic Mad Max Past Thunderdome, Baker explains. Grasp is given a 16kB ROM in addition to RAM, however the seven Blasters should make do with simply RAM.
The design takes its title from Grasp and Blaster, from 1985’s Mad Max Past Thunderdome. (📷: Warner Bros./Dr. Scott M. Baker)
“I wished maintain issues comparatively easy, so I went with a synchronously shared reminiscence design,” Baker writes. “I’m calling it synchronously shared as a result of there’s a distinct order to who has entry to Blaster’s reminiscence. Both Blaster is working and utilizing the reminiscence, or Blaster has halted and Grasp can use the reminiscence. It’s not attainable for each of them to make use of the reminiscence on the similar time.”
An preliminary prototype of the MasterBlaster system revealed an issue: given the job of calculating Conway’s Sport of Life, the machine would run for just a few hundred cycles then crash. Baker traced this to a conflict between an interrupt sign being despatched to a halted Blaster to restart it and the O1 clock being dropped. “Transfer it just some nanoseconds earlier or just a few nanoseconds later,” Baker writes of the instruction, “and it is tremendous. I ended up fixing this by utilizing a flipflop to make sure I solely interrupt on the low-to-high transition of O1, and by no means on the high-to-low transition.”
Baker has launched schematics and supply code for the mission, with Gerber information to observe. (📷: Dr. Scott M. Baker)
The completed machine divides a Conway’s Sport of Life grid into four-row blocks — which provides six of the Blaster boards one thing to do, although the seventh stays idle. “It might doubtlessly [introduce] extra overhead because of the complexity of attempting to make use of him than simply to disregard him,” Baker explains.
The total mission write-up is out there on Baker’s web site, whereas schematics and supply code can be found on GitHub beneath an unspecified license. The Gerber information for producing PCBs, in the meantime, had not been printed on the time of writing, with Baker saying they might be obtainable “quickly after I repair the following revision.”