Transputer documentation required

On Fri, 17 Jul 1998, Julian Richardson wrote: Not very fast, but Intel refined the idea, and I believe they had the world's fastest supercomputer at one point. The basic idea was that you take two elements: a processor and a communication channel, put a bunch of them together is a hypercube topology (in which each node talks to its N nearest neighbors in an N-dimensional cube), and then partition your problem so the processors could work on it in parallel. So, in theory, a 5-cube with 32 processors could run up to 32 times faster than a single-CPU computer. In practice, communication overhead between the nodes can kill performance, and it's not always easy to (re)structure a problem to take advantage of the parallelism. I never worked directly with transputers, but I think the topology was pretty similar, and the operating environment was based on something called Occam. Somebody else with Occam experience should chime in here, but it was basically a language and underlying multiprocess OS that allowed programs to automatically scale to as many processors as were present. -- Doug