International Business Machines Corporation

Roger J Edwards

David Bruce Lindquist

Glen A Brent

Norman Apperley

David C Haigh

Joel Goldman

Frank G Bordonaro

Peter Verey

Michael Haslam

Raymond L Foster

Peyton R Williams, Jr

Kushal A Patel

A system and method for merging a plurality of sorted lists using multiple processors having access to a common memory in which N sorted lists which may exceed the capacity of the common memory are merged in a parallel environment. Sorted lists from a storage device are loaded into common memory and are divided into a number of tasks equal to the number of available processors. The records assigned to each task are separately sorted, and used to form a single sorted list. A multi-processing environment takes advantage of its organization during the creation of the tasks, as well as during the actual sorting of the tasks.

Method and apparatus for merging sorted lists in a multiprocessor shared

A display management system for one or more large plasma gas panel displays (11) is organized to split the display management operations between a host processor (20), a system microprocessor (21) and a picoprocessor (27). The picoprocessor (27) is the heart of a common internal bus (31) plasma display adapter (22). The program for the display is downloaded from the host processor (20) to the system microprocessor (21). The microprocessor generates op codes and initializes display parameters. The plasma display adapter provides control for the plasma panel interface, serialization of character generator data, translates display position addresses for absolute cartesian coordinates to panel address, and computes the boundaries of display panel write and erase operations. Interaction between the system microprocessor and the plasma display adapter is minimized by a code list contained in the microprocessor memory and fetched by direct memory access. This code list contains high level commands which the picoprocessor in the adapter decodes and translates into simple commands for the surrounding interface logic.

Data management for plasma display

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Woodstock, NY, United States of America

Roger J Edwards