🚀 go-pugleaf

I'm not a regular reader of this group, so forgive me if much of this
has been answered; if so, email would be appreciated. We are planning
a transputer project for physics simulations (molecular dynamics). It
seems to me that individual transputers are pretty cheap these days
(less than $100 for T800's ?) whereas complete boards are pretty pricey.
Hence we are thinking of rolling our own, especially since T-8's seem
pretty easy to interface, perhaps using a PC or a Sun as a front end. I
have lots of hardware and software experience, but not with transputers.
     Q1: Is this a reasonable idea ?
It seems that if I buy something like a B008 for the PC and hang my own
transputer box onto that, and get the standard PC software package, that
I should be able to write code for the thing.
     Q2: How much does the TDS care about hardware configurations ?
     Q3: What is the software platform of choice for a PC or Sun-3/110 ?
Finally, we are worried about obsolescence when the H1 comes out.
     Q4: How will mips and mflops of the H1 compare with the T800 ?
     Q5: Should I wait for H1's to come out, or can I build something in
         the next six months and then add H1's to it ?
     Q6: If we wanted high-performance graphics, should we use a dedicated
         transputer, or use the host (i.e., Sun, Iris, etc.) ?
Many thanks for the bandwidth, any and all email responses welcome.
--
Rainer M. Malzbender                           Just another Unix/C demagogue.
Dept. of Physics            (303)492-6829         rainer@hibachi.colorado.edu 
U. of Colorado, Boulder, USA                malzbender@opus.vaxf.colorado.edu