🚀 go-pugleaf

Hi everybody!
As promised, I put together the answers that I've received.
Thank you very much for those who answered me.

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We are interested to acquire a few i860's (2 to 4)
in our investigation of comparing different kinds of
parallel computing. We would like to know is there
is anybody "out there" who has some experiences 
with products involving a few i860's (We're not interested
to big supercomputing machines). We are quite intrigue
by the products which mixe i860 with transputers
(distributed by Meiko, Transtech, Archipel (France), etc)

Our main questions are:
	- performances limited by the presence of the other
	  processor? comparison with pure i860 products.
	- Amount of work involved with different compilers
         since there is 2 different kind of processors.
    - Software compatibility? Does environment such as
      Express (Parasoft), Trollius (Ohio S. Univ.), etc.
	- Shared memory management. Weaknesses?
    - Prices vs quality.

Thank you in advance for your responses.
A summary of the responses will be send to this newsgroup.


                     Michel Mayrand
                     mayrand@lpsvsh.lps.umontreal.ca
                     Laboratoire de Physique Nucleaire
                     Universite de Montreal
                     Fax: (514) 343-6215
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Date: Thu, 17 Sep 1992 11:11:33 -0400
From: Larry Watts <larry@meiko.com>
Message-Id: <199209171511.AA00257@maggie.meiko.com>
To: mayrand@lpsvsh.lps.umontreal.ca
Subject: i860s & Parallel Processing
Status: R

Hello,

I was told you have some questions regarding
our i860 products. Just ask and I will answer.

Do you know we have a system at Universite de Montreal,
it has Sparc and T800 nodes and room for more of those
or i860s. Daniel Charbonneau at 514-343-6111 x8695 is
the person at Universite de Montreal to talk to about
the system.

Good Luck

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Date: Thu, 17 Sep 92 13:07:21 EDT
From: enbody@cps.msu.edu
Message-Id: <9209171707.AA27208@ss33.cps.msu.edu>
To: mayrand@LPS.UMontreal.CA (Michel Mayrand)
Subject: Re: i860+T800 products info
Status: R


Have you considered the iWARP also out of Intel?
It is a commercial product designed for parallel processing.
I have not used it, but have studied it.

-rich
enbody@cps.msu.edu

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>From lfm@pgroup.com Thu Sep 17 15:49:10 1992
Date: Thu, 17 Sep 1992 12:47:21 -0700
From: Larry Meadows <lfm@pgroup.com>
To: mayrandm@IRO.UMontreal.CA
Subject: Re: i860+T800 products info
Newsgroups: comp.sys.transputer,comp.sys.intel
In-Reply-To: <mayrandm.716693538@iros1>
Organization: The Portland Group, Portland, OR
Cc: 

In article <mayrandm.716693538@iros1> you write:
>We are interested to acquire a few i860's (2 to 4)
>in our investigation of comparing different kinds of
>parallel computing. We would like to know is there
>is anybody "out there" who has some experiences 
>with products involving a few i860's (We're not interested
>to big supercomputing machines). We are quite intrigue
>by the products which mixe i860 with transputers
>(distributed by Meiko, Transtech, Archipel (France), etc)
>
>Our main questions are:
>     - performances limited by the presence of the other
>       processor? comparison with pure i860 products.
>     - Amount of work involved with different compilers
>   since there is 2 different kind of processors.
> - Software compatibility? Does environment such as
>   Express (Parasoft), Trollius (Ohio S. Univ.), etc.
>     - Shared memory management. Weaknesses?
> - Prices vs quality.

My company supplies i860 compilers for all of the above companies.  I don't
believe that any of them actually allows you to program the Transputer.
They simply use the Transputer for message passing and to run portions
of the operating system, but the user programs only the i860.

As for price, the best choice for small systems is probably Transtech.
Meiko and Archipel typically sell higher end systems, although perhaps
Archipel might sell a lower end system.

Express runs on the Transtech machine.  I don't believe it runs on the
Meiko Computing Surface.  I'm not sure about Archipel.  You could E-mail
to support@parasoft.com for information.  Transtech's O/S is called GENESYS.
I don't know if it is related to Trollius.

As for memory management, again, normally this is not visible to the
user.  The companies may be able to supply you with information to program
the Transputer, however.

The transputer is fairly slow compared to, for example, the Intel Paragon
machine, but has comparable link speeds with the Intel iPSC/860.  The single
processor i860 performance of all of the above vendors is quite respectable.

Please feel free to ask if you have any more questions, or if I can
put you in touch with any of the above companies.  Thanks.

Larry Meadows
lfm@pgroup.com
-- 
Larry Meadows         The Portland Group
lfm@pgroup.com

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Date: Thu, 17 Sep 92 16:01:11 PDT
From: bosea@chert.CS.ORST.EDU (Arabinda Bose)
Message-Id: <9209172301.AA21932@research.CS.ORST.EDU>
Received: by jasper.CS.ORST.EDU (4.1/SMI-4.1)
	id AA06430; Thu, 17 Sep 92 16:01:09 PDT
To: mayrand@LPS.UMontreal.CA
Subject: Re: i860+T800 products info
Newsgroups: comp.parallel
In-Reply-To: <1992Sep17.143137.21148@hubcap.clemson.edu>
Organization: Oregon State University, Corvallis Oregon
Cc: 
Status: R

This is reply to your request i860+T800 info. 
My name is Anuradha Deogaonkar .
I was working with Centre for Development of advanced Computing, India.
And we have board-level products available with 4T805s and one i860.
The detailed info you can get from:

Dr. Vijay Bhatkar,
Executive Director,
C-DAC,
Pune University Campus, GaneshKhind,
Pune- 411 007.
India.

or email address :
sawant@parcom.ernet.in
sujal@parcom.ernet.in
ramesh@parcom.ernet.in



You can use my name as reference if you wish so.
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Date: Thu, 17 Sep 92 13:50:28 EDT
From: transtech!hjb@TC.Cornell.EDU (Harry Bates)
Message-Id: <9209171750.AA02035@transtech>
To: mayrand@LPS.UMontreal.CA
Subject: i860+T805 based products
Status: R

Dear Michel

I just spotted your message regarding i860+T805 systems.

I will try to answer your questions as best as possible:

1) In Transtech's implementation, the TTM110, the transputer
is only used as a communications processor and thus the only
limitation is in communications bandwith (ie transputer link)
and not processing speed.

Some General Benchmarks

LINPACK: 13.1 MFLOPs
1024 point single precision FFT: 0.49ms

A good example is MAGIC which is a plasma particle simulation
program. This runs for 7 hours on a DEC MicroVax II, 77 mins
on a SPARCstation 1, 10 mins on a Transtech TTM110 & 5 mins
on a Cray II.

2) In single TTM110 systems the transputer is scarcely used
and the compilers supported are the Portland Group Optimizing
Compilers.

In multiple TTM110 systems Transtech's i860 toolset handles
all interprocessor communications. Its main features are:

- Each i860 process has full I/O access to the host screen
  and file system.

- i860 processes communicate via point to point channels

- i860 processes can communicate to transputer processes

- Arbitary topologies of i860 and transputer processor nodes
  are catered for

- The i860 primitives are entirely compatible with T805 &
  T9000 primitives

3) The TTM110 is supported by Transtech's i860 Toolset,
Parasoft's Express and Helios support is imminent.

4) There were certain weeknesses in the shared memory
interface in the first i860 module that Transtech produced,
kown as the TTM100. The major reason for the production of
the TTM110 was to improve the shared memory interface.
We believe that this has been acheived very effectively.

5) This is a very difficult question to answer objectively!
We feel that the systems are of very high quality and
probably the best value on the market. 

An ideal system for someone like yourselves would be a
2-4 node system, housed in our PARAstation "Pizza-box"
being hosted by a Sun SPARC.


I hope this information helps. Obviously my comments are
somewhat biased by my allegiances, however I do feel that
this is an extremely competetive system. I have put our
latest TTM110 technical notes in the mail which I hope 
are of use.

Please do not hesitate to contact me if I can help further.


Sincerely

Harry Bates
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Harry B J  Bates     -----------------------------    /  Transtech  -----------
Transtech Parallel Systems Corporation		    /_/
20 Thornwood Drive		                   /_/_/
Ithaca                   			    /_/  Parallel
New York					     /   Technology
14850-1263
USA				      email:  hjb@transtech.com
 
Tel: (607) 257-6502		      Fax:    (607) 257-3980 

Transtech Parallel Systems Corporation
PO Box 1596
Culver City
California
90232
USA

Tel: (310) 838-0770		      Fax:    (310) 280-0697
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Date: Sun, 20 Sep 92 19:46 GMT
From: "J. Pelan" <AMG5001@VAX2.QUEENS-BELFAST.AC.UK>
To: MAYRAND <MAYRAND@LPSVSH.LPS.UMONTREAL.CA>
Subject: Transputer / i860 Environment
Status: R

Hello there,

Caught your Usenet posting on the above. I've spent the last few months
programming i860's in assembler in a Meiko Computer Surface environment.
(BLAS).

Essentially the code for the transputers and i860s is developed (ie. compiled
and linked) separately (in the language of your choice) and all inter-processor
communications is handled by calls to the CS Tools library. This makes the
system really easy to use from scratch. Suitable code can be made to run in
parallel in a very simple fashion.

The whole kit runs under SunOS and from my point of view is a joy to use.
The system people might have something else to say though (!) but the word is
Good. I haven't heard many complaints.

Just thought you'd like to know !

John Pelan

Dept. of Applied Maths & Theoretical Physics, 
Queens University Belfast,
Belfast BT7 1NN,
Northern Ireland.
(also Parallel Computer Centre, same address).
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