Abstract: The invention concerns the location and characterization of a gene (designated NIM1) that is a key component of the SAR pathway and that in connection with chemical and biological inducers enables induction of SAR gene expression and broad spectrum disease resistance in plants. The invention further concerns transformation vectors and processes for overexpressing the NIM1 gene in plants. The transgenic plants thus created have broad spectrum disease resistance.

Abstract: A scalable computer system has an interconnect bus providing communication links among a host processor and one or more function-specific processors, including a network processor (NP) and a file storage processor (FSP). The host processor provides a single interface to network administrators for maintaining the system. A bi-endian conversion system is provided to minimize a need for translating between big and little endian data types generated by diverse processors. The NP shares a single memory image with other processors and has a buffer memory for buffering requests from the network interfaces. The buffer memory has one or more segments which are dynamically allocatable to different processors. The FSP has a metadata cache for maintaining information on data being cached in the NP buffer memory. The FSP also has a write cache for buffering file write operations directed at disks.