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BESM-6 Nostalgia Page_uacct = "UA-99472-2";urchinTracker(); BESM-6 Nostalgia PageClick here for Russian.Find all aboutbesmatWikiverse  This page is supposed to hold all sorts of informationabout the late (the last original BESM-6 I knew about has been dismantledin 1995)great Soviet mainframe computer BESM-6. For indexing and search purposesI'll mention BESM-6 in Russian (âüóí-6 in KOI-8, ÁÝÑÌ-6 in CP1251).By the way, BESM stands for "Bol'shaya (or Bystrodejstvuyushchaya) Ehlektronno-Schetnaya Mashina",that is, "Big (or High-speed) Electronic Calculating Machine". There also existedBESM-4 (with 45-bit words), and I've even seen it once;but I don't know anything else about it.Instruction SetEmulator newsA sample listingBESM-6 character setNEW! Try the emulator onlineTriviaInteresting linksPhotosThe source codeis now available!!!I hope that this page will eventuallypersuade somebody to reimplement BESM-6, e.g. as a term project(not down to the chip, of course; down to layout with timings).It will be interesting to see how fast it can be today and how manytransistors will be necessary. The CPU had all its registers represented on the front panelby the neon lights; there were 8 48-bit cache registers neatlyaligned - a perfect way for the kernel to communicate with operators "if everything else fails". Today we have to countbeep signals from the BIOS.Here is some brief historyBESM-6 was designed in 1965 by a group of engineers working at theS.A.Lebedev Institute of Precise Mechanics and Computing Equipment(ITMiVT in Russian). One of them was Mark Tyapkin, who is still with IPMCE,afaik.The production started in 1967, by the "SAM Plant" (SAM stands for"Computing-Analytical Machines") in Moscow.The base configuration included CPU, 192 Kb of core memory,magnetic drums, proprietary magnetic tape drives, teletypes, typewriters(with parallel interface), alphanumeric printers and punchcard/punchtape readers and writers.About 350 copies have been made until early 80's. The later configurationsincluded standard 1/2 inch tapes and IBM-clone magnetic disc drives,serial videoterminals, plotters, etc, mostly imported or clones ofthe original hardware.The main purpose of BESM-6 was "number crunching", so it did not haveany specific instructions for character manipulation. The memory could onlybe addressed word by word.There were one or more compilers for most widespread programminglanguages: Algol-60 (3), Fortran (at least 3), Pascal (2) -those I've used; then, there were many more.Off the top of my head: APL, Lisp, Planner, REFAL, Forth, C -those I've seen working, heard of or read about.An extension of BESM-6 (named AS-6) better suited for character manipulationhas been designed, but only several (4-5) copies have been made. (I have noinformation on the AS-6 instruction set extensions. Anyone?)Later, with the advent of Elbrus in early 80's, a newer and faster IC-based versionof BESM-6 was produced as a part of the Elbrus-1 configuration; its namewas Elbrus-1K2 officially ("Elbrus" being the trademark of ITMiVT),and SVS, which stands for "System reproducing the instruction set(of BESM-6)", unofficially. It was about 2.5 times faster than BESM-6.During late 80's, the 64-bit extension of BESM-6 (named Elbrus-1KB, or,briefly, Elbrus-B), featuring the new nativeinstruction set and 2 BESM-6 compatibility modes (original, and withextended memory addressing), was designedand several copies have been made (by the same "SAM plant" that used tomake the original BESM-6's) before the collapse of the USSR.One Elbrus-B has been used in the Meteorological Center in Moscow in 1991;I'm unaware of its today's fate.The element base used for Elbrus-B was hardly better than one of SVS(that is, more than 10 years older than state of the art),and its floating point performance,although impressive (for 20 MHz clock frequency) 2.5 MWhetstones on 64-bitarithmetic, was too low to be competitive.The table below shows how the slippage fromstate of the art progressed. This page will focus on describing BESM-6and, hopefully, SVS.The most interesting features of BESM-6 were: Pipelined CPU (separate pipelines for CU and AU), therefore, unexactFPE interrupts; Virtual memory addressing and paging capability(with expandable page registers, so latest machines had up to severalmegabytes of SRAM); Combined integer and floating point arithmetic unit: actually,there was no specific instructions to perform integer arithmetic.Floating point with suppressed normalisation was used for this purpose,therefore integer division was tricky (does it resemble RISCs?); Each memory word had two parity bits - one for each half, the combinedparity for the whole word must have been odd. Thus, the distinctionbetween code and data was achieved: one had the halfword paritieseven-odd, the other - odd-even, so code overwriting or branches todata got caught as soon as an offending instruction was executed.(The program had to ask the kernel to switch the mode of the storeinstruction to "code" before generating executable code, or to usea special system call, so using self-modifying code was discouraged.); The instruction timing was closer to RISC's than to CISC's. Mostboolean and arithmetic instructions (not multiplication and division, of course)required 2 cycles in CU and about 5 (in average) cycles in AU; Breakpoint and watchpoint registers.Technical informationBESM-6 (1967)SVS (1980)Elbrus-B (1988) native modePerformanceAbout 1 MIPSAbout 2.5 MIPSAbout 3 MIPSClock frequency9 MHz20 MHzElement base60,000 transistors and 170,000 diodes+ECL ICsWord size48 bits64 bitsAddress size15 bits27 bitsAddressable memory192 Kb1 GbAddressable memory granularityWordInstruction set1-operand+How many logic gates is this?TriviaPrintersThe printers connected to BESM-6 were similar to those old IBM lineprinters with a big rotating character drum and a lot of little hammers,and the interface was similar to the one used for IBM 1132:an interrupt was generated whena row of characters on the drum was ready to be struck with the hammers,and the OS had to send a bitmap of the hammers to hit the drum tothe printer no later than 200 us after the interrupt, or it's too late - the drum keeps rotating!That is, the interrupt rate from one printer was about700 per secondi (that corresponds to approximately 6 lines per second), there were two of them, and even with both printers printing,the decrease in responsiveness of the system was barely noticeable.Please send your suggestions and contributions (especially trivia bits)to this address with q's and x's removed.Interesting linksYou may also want to visit:The History of the Development of Parallel Computing pagean articleon purchasing BESM-6 for the Computer Museum in the UK.PhotosThe photo courtesy T.F.Sapozhnikova, JINR, Dubna. This is a table-top reimplementation of BESM-6 as a project in the JointInstitute of Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia.At the console: I.A.Emelin, the head of the BESM-6 engineering group;a real BESM-6 is in the background. The picture was taken in spring 1992; several days later the old BESM-6had been turned off and dismantled.If you have access to a working BESM-6 or its successors:Elbrus-1K2 (SVS) or Elbrus-B, please letme (don't forget to remove q's and x's) know. Thanks.© Leonid A. Broukhis, 1997-2005The BESM-6 pages have been accessed9207 times. |
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