17 Jul
1998
17 Jul
'98
12:18 a.m.
Hi,
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 :)
(so I'm crazy... just seems a shame that I've got various system boards
lying around unused that can't be made into complete machines and are of
no use to anyone else...)
Jules
17 Jul
17 Jul
12:53 a.m.
On Fri, 17 Jul 1998, Julian Richardson wrote:
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
wouldn't be able to easily make one from bits of other computers (although
Tony could probably find a way :-).
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).
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.
-- Doug
1:38 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 :)
(so I'm crazy... just seems a shame that I've got various system boards
lying around unused that can't be made into complete machines and are of
no use to anyone else...)
If they are 386 or better you could put Ethernet in all of them and build
a Beowulf cluster.
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