Transputer

A transputer is a parallel computer, which is equipped with an additional communication hardware to enable data exchange with neighboring computers using message passing efficiently. The word is a portmanteau of "Transmit" and computers. Appropriate devices have been developed since 1978 by the company founded in England Inmos. 1983, the transputer was officially presented. This is to complete microcomputer, which is constructed according to the von Neumann architecture.

Essential to the concept of the transputer were its clustering capabilities and based on it are attempts by the parallelization of computational processes. For the new programming language Occam was developed.

In this context, a (then) very fast connection technology between the compute nodes has been developed. However, since the transputer links work to the rendezvous process and do not have a FIFO, the parallelization is difficult.

To achieve higher speeds, one must use a uni-directional stream. The communication channel must be buffered in a FIFO, the data of the transmitter so that the receiver can process the precursor asynchronously.

Even when communicating via TCP / IP sockets, make sure to perform any low-level knowledge of the messages.

Applications

Application found the transputer for example, in the Atari Transputer Workstation, ATW800 ( Tim King), the Meiko Computing Surface, the parallel computers and the SANG Parsytec companies or even in the Amiga Transputer Workstation. At TUHH a developer board was manufactured. In industry transputer found a relatively large application in the field of regulation and control technology. But not only there:

The Technical University of Munich built a workstation with 137 transputers for solving problems in mathematical optimization.

At the University of Siegen, but also as a workstation for medical imaging has been developed. The most well-known in Germany using a transputer is probably the S2M -T1 card from AVM. Could be installed in the connected wired external 1U high 19 "case for data compression in real time up to 30 ISDN channels an additional board with T800 transputer. Also in the space travel was like to fall back on the transputer, so the spacecraft SOHO sends still images using a transputer network. In EUREKA Prometheus Project transputer were used in autonomous robotic vehicle VaMoRs by Ernst Dick 's to control a vehicle on the basis of purely visual data automatically through the traffic.

In 1989 SGS -Thomson bought the company Inmos, in consequence, the development and the late 1990s was the mid-1990s set the production of the transputer. The architecture of the transputer survived partly in the microprocessor ST20 family.

INMOS B004 evaluation map

INMOS T800

Block diagram T800

Example Configuration