🚀 go-pugleaf

Dear Mailing List!

In the following, I'll post some impressions from the CONPAR 88
exhibition in Manchester.

HARDWARE:
=========

There were lots of PC boards, but the more serious work seems to be done
on SUN hosts (nobody is really happy with the PC HW&SW). Still, there is
no stand-alone transputer hardware (i.e. running with no host).

Transtech:
----------

They had the widest and nicest selection of PC boards, among others:
* 17 T's with no ext. RAM on one board.
* 9 T's with 1MB each, plus C004, on one board.
* PC boards with interrupt & DMA facilities.
* A graphics board (with not much software, sorry).
* A disk board (A single board containing a fast (28ms) 20 - 100 MB 3''
hard disk, a M212 disk transputer based controller, a PC interface
(DMA), and 4 TRAM sites. Software for accessing disk directly via link
for TDS- and afserver-based applications, and for accessing disk from PC
as MSDOS D: drive, but *not* yet for Helios-PC).
* A PS/2 TRAM motherboard with 2*2 TRAM sites and fast DMA. The board
was 2 days old! (Software: Currently only TDS, afserver being under
development).
* TRAM modules of extreme density, e.g. 4MB, size 2, or 8 MB, size 4,
all with 0 or 1 wait at 20 MHz, with parity. However, they are very
high, occupying the next PC slot.
* Ethernet, graphics and disk modules under development.
* Niche products for Sun's (SW looks impressive, nicely integrated in
SunOS, they networked it with the transputers on the Niche machine in
the next room).
* Atari ABAQ & Perihelion card box: Yes, it really works (running
Helios), but it is not yet in a single box (still Mega-ST plus external
boards), and it has no local disk yet (still uses slow ST disk).

Parsys:
-------

This is a company of Thorn-Emi producing the ESPRIT Supernode machine,
they had two of them there and running: Mid to large range (16 to at
least 1024 T's), 1/4 (SRAM) or 4 or 16 (DRAM) MB / Transp., special link
switch (just another chip, not C004 and not Meiko's), local disk
interfaces, a lot of debugging and monitoring hardware, needs PC or Sun
host (standalone systems planned), runs TDS or IDRIS (see below).

Others:
-------

Meiko, Caplin, ... have been there, but offered no sensations.

Inmos:
------

Just showed the flight simulator.


SOFTWARE:
=========

There was no new software running, but lots of rumors:
* Ada (Meiko, Inmos)
* Lisp (Parsys (still confidential) and some others)
* Prolog (many companies, most based on Brainware's CS-Prolog, others
coming from Edinburgh)
* Inmos will perhaps support some kind of UNIX or Helios (not yet
decided)
* Definicon will offer CUBIX and EXPRESS (Operating system kernels and
I/O & message passing libraries based on Caltec Hypercube developments,
compatible with Cros III).

AI Limited:
-----------

They will offer a Prolog-like environment for AI and symbolic
computation SW development, including a new language, on a wide range of
machines (Transputer systems, intel Hypercubes, ...) in 1Q89.

Parsys:
-------

They offer the first real UNIX for multi-transputer systems:
* Whitesmith IDRIS (well known on Z80, MC 680x0, ...).
* Conforms completely to the POSIX standard
* Supports multiple users (again at most one user per transputer) with
protection
* Does not page, but *does* swap.
* Full ANSI C, full ISO Pascal, full UNIX utilities
* and many other nice features...
The bad news: They have an *exclusive* contract with Whitesmith, IDRIS
will not be avail on any other transputer system...


Ask for more details, tell me if I missed something or said something
wrong!

Klaus Kusche (K312240@AEARN.BITNET).