Transputer documentation required

From: Julian Richardson <JRichardson_at_softwright.co.uk>
Date: Fri Jul 17 05:25:57 1998

>> So can any of you recommend a good book on how transputers work in a
>> broad sense? I occasionally have the urge to take all the old PC system
>> boards lying around and construct some form of transputer system - ok,
>> so it's impractical, would be a lot of work, and wouldn't be of any
>> benefit at all, but it would be an interesting exercise :)
>
>> A transputer is a specific type of processor from inmos (IIRC), so you

you learn something new every day (or in my case, several hundred things
;)
I always thought that transputer was a general term for any processing
component in a parallel system.

>> However, you could certainly build a parallel processing supercomputer
>> from a bunch of old PCs. In fact, that was the original idea behind Cal
>> Tech's Cosmic Cube which eventually led to Intel's hypercubes (such as the
>> iPSC/1).

hmm, wait for Java chips to really take off and write the whole lot in
Java... now there's a plan... :*)
>
>> I wouldn't be surpised if somebody still has the Cosmic Cube code around,
>> which would allow you to network some 8088-based machines to create a
>> hypercube. I have an old Unix-based hypercube simulator from Intel which
>> was based on the Cosmic Cube code, but I haven't looked into the copyright
>> issues.

parallel systems was a whole area that I never got too heavily in to at
university and regretted it afterwards (and being a fairly specialist
area it probably means you can get away from bad products produced by
monopolising companies :^)

I was tempted to ask how fast these 8088-based 'cubes were, but I
suppose it's really hard to describe real-world performance of such
systems without actually using them...

Jules
>
Received on Fri Jul 17 1998 - 05:25:57 BST