Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!rutgers!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!OSCSUNA!gdburns
From: gdburns@OSCSUNA (Greg D. Burns)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.transputer
Subject: mailing list
Message-ID: <111@OSCSUNA>
Date: 6 Sep 88 22:06:16 GMT
Organization: Ohio Supercomputer Center
Lines: 51


My observation is that we have been receiving a steady stream of postings
from Europe but very little from North America.

It is interesting, though understandable, to note that Europe folks seem
to be much less informed about the happenings in North America while the
opposite is true here.  Case in point:  VME/Unix posting from Europe will
not mention Topologix while the same posting from here will not mention
NiCHE.  I am generalizing, of course.

Our group, and in particular Andy Pfiffer, started the transputer list
while we were at Cornell.  Andy is now at Topologix and I am now at
the Ohio Supercomputer Center/The Ohio State University.  Both of us,
and the original group at Cornell (with much new blood), continue to
develop Trollius.  For those of you interested in time frames, Trollius
was officially complete for 1.0 Beta release, shipped out the door
and available to all on December 21, 1987.

In light of the dearth of eastbound messages, perhaps I can flog
the latest version of tsim, our transputer simulator.  It was
originally built to develop transputer code in the absence of transputers.
In fact we used it often after we had real transputers to crack difficult
bugs.  Clearly, I'm talking about an instruction set simulator, and I'm
sure that there are many around today.  Here are the latest features in
version 3.

* all t414 instructions (s/w floating point should work, I'm testing)
* all non-floating point T800 instructions
* complete timing on all simulated instructions
* almost true to life LINK SIMULATOR (caveat:  imagine a FIFO on each link)
* event channel simulation (triggered by signal, definable in map file)
* completely new monitor, compatible with tbug (same commands, new parser)
* command line options for a) silent mode b) boot from link/ROM c) startup
  script
* much, much more online help info, "h" format for every command
* "w" command prints info/status on any device
* completely accurate timeslicing and preemption

The big addition here is the link simulator.  It means that we can
simulate multiple transputer networks.  Trollius runs on it and I
don't see why TDS and anything else won't work on it as well.  I literally
toss tsim into the background and use my regular transputer software.
Tsim is written in `C' and runs on 4.2BSD or better.  In fact, at
the Ohio Supercomputer Center, we have an Cray X-MP running Unix, so
we can simulate a transputer on a Cray.  (I haven't tried it yet.)

-- 
Greg Burns				gdburns@oscsunb.osc.ohio-state.edu
Trillium Diving Team			(614) 292-8492
Ohio Supercomputer Center
"...that's the way a Transputer works, right?"