🚀 go-pugleaf

>>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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