Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!ember!dre
From: dre%ember@Sun.COM (David Emberson)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Transputer based systems.
Summary: Transputers and Unix
Message-ID: <69514@sun.uucp>
Date: 22 Sep 88 01:00:50 GMT
References: <253@uceng.UC.EDU> <3011@hubcap.UUCP>
Sender: news@sun.uucp
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In my former life in hypercube-land I evaluated the Transputer (the older
one, T414) and Occam.  The Transputer isn't a bad machine, except that it has
no memory management, no protection of any kind, and no supervisor mode.  This
is probably why you don't see Transputer systems running Unix.  Occam and its
associated editor and tools are totally unusable.  Among other things, the
language had no pointers, interprocessor communication was point-to-point, the
language had white space dependencies (!), and other sins too numerous to list.
Every time we would complain, the poor local technical rep from Inmos would
say something about the great new version just on the horizon.  One time, one
of the big honchos from England (I forget the name but he was one of the top
architects) came through on a U.S. tour.  I spent three hours arguing with
him about giving me the details of the assembly language--which at that time
they did not want to make public.  He made a remark that he did not understand
why "we Americans" were so interested in the machine dependent details.  "In
Europe, no one asks us these questions, and they are satisfied with Occam."
I finally said something like, "If I don't know how the chip works, I sure as
hell am not going to design it into my machine."  End of conversation.

Inmos finally did come around and publish an assembler manual, and a couple of
companies are making Transputer-based machines.  One company makes a four-cpu
board that plugs into the Sun backplane.  I think you can have up to 16 cpus.
I don't know about the programming environment, but I think they have C.
Sorry about not having the name, but I seem to have misplaced the literature.
It's probably buried under heaps of much more interesting Sparc stuff... :-)

			Dave Emberson (dre@sun.com)