I wonder....
has anyone carried Inmos links over IP? When I get my 300
node monster running it would be "fun" to network these Transputer
machines.
I guess it depends how timing sensitive the links are - I have no idea.
Would be nice to be able to point your local farm at another and have it
boot from it and join in :o)
300 nodes you say... Is that a Whitecross box? I was at a seminar at HP
Labs recently where an ex-Whitecross (now Kognitio) exec did a talk. I
wish I'd asked him if they still get to pull out old transputer kit.
Andrew
Yes the box is Whitecross, a WX9020. It was one of the largest installs
they did and has 342 T425s on dedicated processing cards (6 per card
with 16MB ECC RAM per processor and 19 cards per crate, 3 crates).
There's about another 50 dotted around on disk controllers, system
controllers, etc.
Thinking about it the links are synchronous at 10 or 20MHz so I doubt
anything other than a direct P2P link would work. Shame ;)
I did visit the Kognitio office and picked up a couple of the specially
configured Solaris workstations (they use fibre for the inter crate
communication and to the workstation). I was also given lots of
documentation which is a real help! They did inform me that the links
are very prone to noise which is one of the reasons for fibre, and they
can mux 6 links per fibre.
When I took the system I didn't have space or transport to take the
rather nice custom built racks so ended up taking the individual crates,
power supplies and a mass of fibre. These are now mounted in a standard
19" rack and I'm currently sorting out some suitable cooling. I've had a
full crate and system controller running with diagnostics running on the
workstation. That can see all the transputers. Still a way to go till
it's a usable system :)
Cheers,
James
