The Wisconsin Wind Tunnel (WWT) Project seeks to develop a consensus about the middle-level interface--below languages and compilers and above system software and hardware. Our first proposed interface was Cooperative Shared Memory, which is an evolutionary extension to conventional shared-memory software and hardware. Recently, we have been working on a more revolutionary interface called Tempest. Tempest provides the mechanisms that allow programmers, compilers, and program libraries to implement and use message passing, transparent shared memory, and hybrid combinations of the two. We are developing implementations of Tempest on a Thinking Machines CM-5, a cluster of workstations (Wisconsin COW), and a hypothetical hardware platform. One approach on COW uses bus snooping logic, implemented with FPGAs and SRAM. We are collaborating with the Wisconsin Paradyn Project to adapt their performance tools to Tempest.
Overview and Annotated Bibliography
Slides from an Overview Talk (November 1995) with one slide per page or four slides per page
Wisconsin Week Article on WWT & Paradyn
Wisconsin CS's Computer Architecture Group
Computer Sciences Department at the University of Wisconsin
World-Wide Computer Architecture Information