Tera Computer Co says it has submitted 15 applications to the US Patent and Trademark office, covering software and hardware aspects of its MTA Multi-threaded Architecture supercomputer. A single MTA processor supports up to 128 instruction streams, or virtual processors, rather than the usual single stream. Now that we are in production, we believe it is important to maintain our competitive edge by further protecting the core elements of our technology, said Tera president Jim Rottsolk. Mainstream processors using very long instruction word architectures, such as numerous digital signal processors, graphics and multimedia chips, not to mention Intel Corp’s Merced processors, had heading in a similar direction. Tera’s patent applications cover such subjects as how to deal with interruptions, synchronization, memory allocation and parallelization in multi-threaded environments.
