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ThePowerNode 9080 was a dual processor32-bitSuperminicomputer produced byFort Lauderdale,Florida based electronics companyGould Electronics in the 1980s.[1] Its UTX/32 4.3BSDBerkeley Unix-based operating system was one of the first multi-processor shared memory implementations of Unix, although the processors operated in a Master-Slave configuration with a Mutual Exclusion (MutEx) lock on all manipulations onKernel tables. The second processor, called IPU, left all I/O operations to the main CPU.[2] Machines could be configured for either single or dual processor operation. At launch in the mid-eighties the PowerNode 9080 was sold at $385,000.[1][3]
The machine itself was housed in a number of 19 inch rack cabinets and the mainCPUs consisted of 18 boards of ECL logic. The resulting system was capable of benchmark performances up to 10MIPS, a very high rating at the time.[1] The PowerNode systems were a very close relative of Gould Concept-32real-time computer systems running their proprietaryMPX real time operating system. Only about two boards differed between PowerNode machines running Unix and the real-time versions running MPX. The most significant of these was the Memory Management board which hadvirtual memory mapping abilities in the Unix variant but not in the real-time variant.
A smaller model of the PowerNode was also available in the form of the Gould PowerNode 6032 and 6040 single processor systems and 6080 dual CPU which achieved a 7MIPS performance similar to the contemporary DECVAX-11/780 andVAX-11/785.
The PowerNode series was replaced by the Gould NP-1 series. When Gould was purchased by Nippon Mining, the computer division was divested on the instructions of the US Government for National Security concerns and became part ofEncore Computer.