🚀 go-pugleaf

Luigi Rizzo (lr@cs.brown.edu) writes:

>  TRAM modules are kind of a toy: you buy one (or an evaluation
>  kit) and don't care too much about the price; then your
>  interest disappears... 
>  ...those who are really interested in massive use of Transputer,
>  and do care about their [company|school]'s money, sure they
>  build their own modules...

Jeff Carroll (carroll@ssc-vax.boeing.com) writes:

>     I think there are two kinds of people who use transputers.
> One is the computer scientist who is doing research on parallel
> systems, and the other is the scientist or engineer whose
> number-crunching application takes too long to run on his PC.
> ...the needs of either are likely to be met with a relatively small
> transputer network (about the size that will fit into the spare
> slots in the user's PC).

This brings up a simple question: Who wants massively parallel
machines anyhow? Computer Scientists and Engineers experiment
with and develop systems - what are they used for? I'm all
for research for its own sake, but there are actually people
out there who want to apply it. I suppose the questions are more
along these lines: What are the foreseen uses of large parallel
machines? Is this in line with current research? What should 
they be used for (besides weather prediction, Mandelbrot sets, etc.)?

Just wondering

Bill <Moses@NADC.NAVY.MIL>