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From: preston@felix.UUCP (Preston Bannister)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.misc
Subject: Re: Atari/Perihelion Transputer Machine Spec
Message-ID: <13145@felix.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 16-Nov-87 13:40:35 EST
Article-I.D.: felix.13145
Posted: Mon Nov 16 13:40:35 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 18-Nov-87 06:31:22 EST
References: <1034@titan.camcon.uucp> <32936@sun.uucp> <5119@oberon.USC.EDU> <888@atari.UUCP> <2299@gryphon.CTS.COM>
Sender: daemon@felix.UUCP
Reply-To: preston@felix.UUCP (Preston Bannister)
Organization: FileNet Corp., Costa Mesa, CA
Lines: 33
Keywords: Atari Transputer Perihelion

>>The ABAQ includes 3 "links", which are 10-megabit-per-second serial
>>interfaces for talking to off-board transputers.
>>
>>Jack Lang, in his talk at the Atari press conference at Comdex, supposed a
>>setup where workers each had their own transputer system on their desks,
>>with all of them linked together and linked to a separate box containing
>>many transputers.  As an application's need for processing power increased,
>>it could pull more transputers in.  An intriguing concept -- throw the
>>computer into high gear.

>Apollo has this today - NCS - Network Computing System. Basically
>a program can call subroutines on other machines on the network.
>Even different computers (Cray's to PC's) on heterogeneous networks.

I would expect that the inter-Transputer 'links', being implemented at
the _hardware_ level, may be substantially faster than the procedure
call & network I/O used by Apollo.

If the granularity of the problem is large enough, then the difference
in overhead wouldn't matter.  For problems with smaller granularity,
the low overhead inter-Transputer communication might allow you to
distribute the work among a greater number of CPU's without getting
swamped by overhead.

Of course, it would be interesting (and valuable) for someone to
actually prove this.  Any takers?  Atari? :-)

--
Preston L. Bannister
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