16 Jul
1998
16 Jul
'98
10:25 p.m.
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 > 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