🚀 go-pugleaf

Hi!

I work at a place called Cogent Research and we build a self-hosted transputer-
based workstation (plus compute server).  We use the C and Fortran compiler
formerly supplied by Penguin/Pentasoft that's now distributed by Unidot in
Golden, Colorado.  It grew out of work done at Cornell University on the
old Floating Point System T-series machine and its the best implementation
we've found (we have tweaked it here and there and rewritten portions for
our own use).

As with all other transputer compilers I've seen the real performance
bottleneck is in the linker, the linker needs to compute all the prefix
information for relocations and this is usually *slow*.  At Cogent we
finally gave up and wrote our own linker since all the other ones
we came across were so slow.  I'd bet ours is the fastest in the business
now.  So I'd suggest you time linking speeds of "hello, world" and a few
larger programs when comparing toolsets.

We used to use the Logical Systems toolset and it was pretty good, with one
exception, it could not generate relocatable code (I'm not sure if this
limitation has been overcome yet).  You had to fix all programs to a
specific address in memory.  Needless to say, for our purposes, that of
putting a real operating system on the chip, with multiple tasks going, 
that was an impossible limitation.  That's why we jumped to Unidot's.

Don't expect any service/support from Unidot though, the guy who vends it
doesn't seem to believe in support.  He'll tell you anything on the phone
(a la "I'll fix it today and send it to you tomorrow), but he *never* comes
through.  At least Logical Systems support was extremely friendly and 
competant (and they *would* come through on promises).

I don't have any info on 3L, haven't seen/used their stuff.

If you have any more queries, just email them to me, or even phone me up
and ask for "John in software".

John Roberts
robertsj@admin.ogi.edu

ps
In case you're interested, I'll enclose my standard speil on Cogent's system...
If not, abort/terminate this message here.

Oh, my phone number is (503)690-1450  (Cogent Research, Inc.)


Here is a description of the Cogent Machine overall hardware.

The Cogent Workstation consists of two Inmos T800 transputers, each with
4 Mbytes of RAM, a 90 MByte internal hard drive and an 800K floppy drive.
The monitor is 1024 by 808 by 256 (8 bits per pixel).

A workstation can be connected to one or more computer servers, we call them
"Resource Servers."  Resource Servers consist of a backplane with 16 slots.
One slot is dedicated to a communication board to connect to other
Resource Servers or workstations.  The other 15 slots can hold processor
boards.  Each processor board contains 2 T800's again each with 4 MBytes of
RAM.  In addition to bus communication, there is a crossbar switch to
connect links on any two transputers in the Resource Server.  The idea is
that short messages will go rapidly over the bus, and longer messages will
go over the serial links.  A Resource Server can have up to 30 processors
with 120 Mbyte of RAM.  This is in addition to a workstation's 2 processors
and 8 Mbytes of RAM.

It is also possible for multiple workstations to be connected to a single
resource server, so users can share processors.  Processors are allocated
in a fashion similar to using "malloc" and "free" memory allocation in C.
When a user aquires a processor, he or she owns it until it is explicitly
relinquished (or until the user turns off their workstation).  No other
user has access to another's processors (this decision was made since
the transputer does not have memory protection, this way no other user
can corrupt your memory -- only you can corrupt your memory).

Our operating system is called Qix, "pronounced Quicks",  (our Workstation is 
called an "XTM Workstation").  It is highly compatible with the POSIX standard
A host of utilities that are normally provided with *IX systems are provided
with our system (such as grep, awk, sed, vi, emacs, diff, more, tar, compress,
etc...).

The underlying communication system implemented is a simplified and extended
version of Yale Linda called "Kernel Linda".  This is implemented at a very
low level of our OS (for speed).  A full Yale Linda implementation is in
the works, however Kernel Linda also has some extensions not present in
Yale Linda (such as multiple tuple spaces, necessary for our multitasking
environment).

It is possible to write parallel programs using Kernel Linda that use all
the processors available to any one user (for instance a user with a workstation
and a resource server could have up to 32 processors available for his
program).

We also have a very nice windowing package based on Sun's NeWS called "PIX".
PIX is our implementation of NeWS (if you're not familiar with NeWS, its
sort of an extension of Display Postscript).

Languages currently available are C, C++ and Fortran.


John  Roberts
robertsj@ogcadmin.ogi.edu

"hanging out at Cogent Research, Inc. and the Oregon Graduate Center"

For further info:
Cogent Research, Inc.
1100 NW Compton Drive
Beaverton, Oregon  97006
(503)690-1450