HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: andyr@wizzy.com (Andy Rabagliati)
Subject: Re: Link Splitting
Organization: W. Z. I.
Date: Thu, 5 Nov 1992 04:59:11 GMT

In article <27661@castle.ed.ac.uk> bxhv02@castle.ed.ac.uk (Tim Wilkinson) writes:
>
>I'm looking for some info on the probability of splitting a single transputer
>link to allow it to be connected to more than one destination transputer. 

>         Tim Wilkinson 		 email tjw@cs.hull.ac.uk

A transputer uses both wires of a link, even for unidirectional
communication. Each byte that goes out, must have an acknowledge come
back before another byte will be sent.

So, don't even *think* of bi-directional communication.

The Correct Way would be to have the two 'return' wires go into a
circuit that produced a 200ns pulse (10Mhz) or 100ns pulse (20Mhz) when
one ack had been received from each return wire.

The Dirty Way would be connect one return wire, ignore the other return
wire, and hope for the best.

What could go wrong ?

Well, only that the second receiving transputer could drop, garble, and
generally behave in a very un-transputery fashion. But, if it isn't
doing anything else, and (especially) if you are nice to it and have
comms go straight into internal RAM, or you help it along by delaying
the other ack by a tick or two, you might get away with it.

Don't tell the Transputer police, though.

print ! "Just another occam hacker",   Cheers, Andy.
-- 
andyr@wizzy.com  Andy Rabagliati, RR1 Box 33, Wyalusing, PA 18853 (717)746-7780
From: rob@pact.nl (Rob Kurver)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.transputer
Subject: Re: Transp. for Neural Nets etc.
Date: 13 Nov 92 14:31:48 GMT
Organization: PACT, Delft, The Netherlands

In <1992Nov12.094923.28263@edb.tih.no> christia@colargol (Segmentation fault (core dumped)) writes:

>I am thinking seriously of buying a transputer card for my PC.  I
>have never used a transputer, and never seen one - buying it is
>the only way I can get my hands on such a machine.

>I will be using the transputer for simulations of neural networks.
>Would a transputerboard with one tram (a T800 with 2MB Dram) be well suited
>for such an application?  Would anything cheaper also be ok for such an    
>application?   

>For a transputer system consisting of a motherboard, a T800 w. 2MBdram, and
>a C dev.kit I expect to pay aprx. $3000 - am I beeing ripped off?

If don't want to spend a lot of money to find out what good transputers
are to you, you may wish to consider starting with one of the Transputer
Educational Kits.  Such a kit offers a transputer (T800 usually optional)
with a collection of software (Occam plus C) and some sort of hands-on
transputer course.  I know of two companies that make them:  CSA in
the U.S.A. and Bieware in The Netherlands.  Please email me for address
details.

>Christian Hilmersen 

Rob

--
     PACT                   Rob Kurver
    Foulkeslaan 87         rob@pact.nl
   2625 RB Delft     ph: +31 15 616864 
  The Netherlands   fax: +31 15 610032
Newsgroups: comp.sys.transputer
From: christia@colargol (Segmentation fault (core dumped))
Subject: Transp. for Neural Nets etc.
Organization: Colargol, Trondheim College of Engineering
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.1 PL6]
Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1992 09:49:23 GMT

Hi,

I am thinking seriously of buying a transputer card for my PC.  I
have never used a transputer, and never seen one - buying it is
the only way I can get my hands on such a machine.

I will be using the transputer for simulations of neural networks.
Would a transputerboard with one tram (a T800 with 2MB Dram) be well suited
for such an application?  Would anything cheaper also be ok for such an    
application?   

For a transputer system consisting of a motherboard, a T800 w. 2MBdram, and
a C dev.kit I expect to pay aprx. $3000 - am I beeing ripped off?

Thanx in advance.

Christian Hilmersen 
christia@edb.tih.no
Norway
From: dhd@exnet.co.uk (Damon)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.transputer
Subject: Re: MS-Windows access for transputers
Keywords: MS-Windows, Transputers
Date: 10 Nov 92 02:33:49 GMT
Organization: ExNet Systems Ltd Public Access News, London, UK

In article <1992Nov9.230533.13209@lucrece.robots.ox.ac.uk> tom@robots.ox.ac.uk (Tom Burke) writes:
>Hi,
>	I'm using a PC as a transputer host and was wondering if
>anyone out there in netland have written an extension to ``iserver''
>which allows access to Microsoft Windows facilities?  A public domain
>program would be preferable but any good commercial packages would
>also be of interest.

In the April 1991 issue of Parallelogram magazine I reviewed
Perihelion's Windows's File Server (for the Helios transputer operating
system) which provided a limited access to graphics on the host PC.

You should definitely see what their latest offering is, and they
are at:

Tel: +44 749 344203
Fax: +44 749 344977

[I posted this since I think the answer might be of general interest...]

Damon
-- 
Damon Hart-Davis                          Internet: dhd@exnet.co.uk, d@hd.org

PUBLIC ACCESS UNIX (Suns), NEWS AND MAIL FOR UK#5 PER MONTH.  FIRST MONTH FREE.
[1.34] Cheap Sun eqpt.  UUCP news/mail feeds.  Tel/Fax: +44 81 755 0077.
Newsgroups: comp.sys.transputer
From: Marco Kesseler <marcok@cs.kun.nl>
Subject: Re: IS Occam3 recursive?
Organization: University of Nijmegen
X-Useragent: Nuntius v1.1
Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1992 10:11:04 GMT


In article <1992Nov12.094835.8563@wraxall.inmos.co.uk> Geoff Barrett,
geoffb@inmos.co.uk writes:
>More seriously, it does illustrate an important property of occam
>processes, namely that their workspace requirements can be determined
>statically.  If you can't do this, then the implementation of parallel
>processes becomes much more difficult. In current implementations of
>occam, it is possible to allocate a fixed amount of workspace for each
>parallel process.  If you allow recursive processes you cannot
>determine statically how much workspace each process will need.  This
>means that you have to know what to do with stack overflow when the
>obvious place to extend it has been allocated to something else
>already.

Sofar, I agree.

>If you think you have a solution to this, and it does not
>have an adverse affect on the context switch time, then I will be
>interested to hear it.

I am confused. What do you mean when you talk about a 'context
switch'? It is clear that recursion implies additional overheads
at runtime during function calls. That it affects the time to
timeslice processes is totally new to me. Perhaps I am missing
a point here.

>In general, it is more important for an
>embedded application to be sure of enough space in which to run.  After
>all, you don't want to run out of memory just as you reach a critical
>section of control code.

Yes, but knowing how much stack space the embedded application needs
is no reason to rule out the possibility to use recursion in some
language:
If you don't need it, don't use it.

Marco Kesseler

Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science
University of Nijmegen
Toernooiveld 1
6525 ED Nijmegen
The Netherlands

marcok@cs.kun.nl
Newsgroups: comp.sys.transputer
From: tom@sees.bangor.ac.uk
Subject: X Server for TTG3?
Summary: Has anyone seen/ported an Xserver for a TTG3?
Keywords: X server, TTG3
Organization: University of Wales, Bangor
X-Newsreader: Tin 1.1 PL5
Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1992 13:12:52 GMT

Hello all,

It's a simple question, but perhaps the answer isn't so easy. Has anyone
seen, ported, bought an X server for a TTG3 graphics TRAM?

Please not, the From header above may not be correct. Use the e-mail address
below.


Tom.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  Tom Crummey,                      EMAIL: tom@sees.bangor.ac.uk |      /\      
  University of Wales, Bangor,                                   |     /  \/\      
  School of Electronic Engineering Science,                      |  /\/    \ \     
  Dean Street, Bangor,                    TEL: +44 (0)248 382806 | /  ======\=\    
  Gwynedd, LL57 1UT, U.K.                 FAX: +44 (0)248 361429 |  B A N G O R    
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: tyzec@westminster.ac.uk (Andy Macfarlane)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.transputer
Subject: READING FROM FILES USING OCCAM-2
Date: 13 Nov 92 10:04:54 GMT
Distribution: comp
Organization: University of Westminster

I need to read and write from files using occam-2. I use an
occam simulator on sunOS.

I have procedures to write chars, strings, ints int32's hex etc etc to files,
but no knowledge of those procedures to read back these types from 
files.

Can anybody tell me these please?

Andrew Macfarlane
University Of Westminster
School of Computer Science
Newsgroups: comp.sys.transputer
From: tom@robots.ox.ac.uk (Tom Burke)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.transputer,comp.windows.ms,comp.windows.ms.programmer,comp.os.ms-windows.apps,comp.os.ms-windows.misc,comp.os.ms-windows.programmer.misc
Subject: MS-Windows access for transputers
Keywords: MS-Windows, Transputers
Date: 9 Nov 92 23:05:33 GMT
Followup-To: comp.sys.transputer
Organization: Robotics Research Group, Engineering Science Dept, Oxford, UK.
Originator: tom@lucrece.robots

Hi,
	I'm using a PC as a transputer host and was wondering if
anyone out there in netland have written an extension to ``iserver''
which allows access to Microsoft Windows facilities?  A public domain
program would be preferable but any good commercial packages would
also be of interest.

	Thanks in advance,
Newsgroups: comp.sys.transputer
From: rob@pact.nl (Rob Kurver)
Subject: Re: Phantom processes on reset
Organization: PACT, Delft, The Netherlands
Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1992 14:28:00 GMT

In <8787@ndigital.com> TERRY@ndigital.com (Terry Fisher) writes:

>A few months ago, I caught the tail end of a discussion about phantom
>processes being started after RESET when a T805 was configured to boot
>from ROM.  Lately, we have been having some problems with T805s occasionally
>going off to never never land on boot up from ROM.

>Could someone please let me know what causes this phantom process to
>start.  What does the phantom process usually do?

I've emailed you a copy of the article John Roberts posted in May, which
mentioned this problem and presented a solution.

Rob
--
     PACT                   Rob Kurver
    Foulkeslaan 87         rob@pact.nl
   2625 RB Delft     ph: +31 15 616864 
  The Netherlands   fax: +31 15 610032
From: pdp@ariel.ucs.unimelb.EDU.AU (Paul Douglas Page)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.transputer
Subject: T9000
Date: 7 Nov 92 20:49:04 GMT
Article-I.D.: ariel.1desp0INN5as
Organization: University of Melbourne
NNTP-Posting-Host: ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au

Whats the status on th INMOS T9000 can you get the things yet?
If so what is the approx. cost in small quantities for prototyping?

THanks in advance.
Newsgroups: comp.sys.transputer
Subject: Call for Speakers
From: <MLWLG@CUNYVM.BITNET>
Date: Thursday, 5 Nov 1992 23:48:19 EST
Organization: City University of New York/ University Computer Center

                       Call for Speakers
                              on
                        Supercomputing

The 1993 Spring Seminar: Supercomputing is the 24th in a series of semi-annual
all-day technical seminars sponsored by the New York Chapter of the IEEE
Computer Society.  It will be held tentatively May 11, 1993, at the United
Engineering Center, 345 E. 47th Street, New York City.

This seminar will be devoted to all aspects of theory, design and applications
of supercomputer systems.  A partial list of topics of interest includes:

 hardware architectures            programming models
 design                            design considerations
 performance considerations        languages
                                   applications

Prospective speakers are invited to submit a brief idea about their talk
(or paper) to the Seminar Committee as an introduction.

The Seminar Committee would like to identify those showing interest in
participating by February 11, 1993 to formulate a more detailed agenda.

Please contact:

Lawrence Muller - CIS Dept     Mark Lukasiewicz
LaGuardia Community College    Lukasiewicz Innovations, Inc
31-10 Thomson Ave              35 Carolina Dr
LIC, NY 11101                  New City, NY 10956-3031
718-349-4045                   914-634-7969 phone/fax
718-482-5599 fax
l.muller@ieee.org

            IEEE Computer Society, New York Chapter
Newsgroups: comp.sys.transputer
From: geoffb@inmos.co.uk (Geoff Barrett)
Subject: Re: IS Occam3 recursive?
X-Newsreader: Tin 1.1 PL5
Date: Thu, 12 Nov 92 09:48:34 GMT

Tim Walker (tsw@netcom.com) wrote:
: 
:  Does anyone know if Occam3 will be recursive? This is a big drawback
: in Occam2 when trying to implement things like parallel searchs.
: 
:  -- Tim Walker  (tsw@netcom.com)

The short answer is `no'.

There is, however, a way to get fixed depth recursion.  Suppose the
definition you want to achieve is:

  PROC foo (formals)
    body  --  contains call to foo
  :

Then you can achieve recursion to depth n by repeating the code thus:

  PROC foo (formals)
    STOP
  :
  PROC foo (formals)
    body  --  contains call to foo
  :
  ...  repeat n-2 times
  PROC foo (formals)
    body  --  contains call to foo
  :

This might be regarded as a dirty hack.

More seriously, it does illustrate an important property of occam
processes, namely that their workspace requirements can be determined
statically.  If you can't do this, then the implementation of parallel
processes becomes much more difficult.  In current implementations of
occam, it is possible to allocate a fixed amount of workspace for each
parallel process.  If you allow recursive processes you cannot
determine statically how much workspace each process will need.  This
means that you have to know what to do with stack overflow when the
obvious place to extend it has been allocated to something else
already.  If you think you have a solution to this, and it does not
have an adverse affect on the context switch time, then I will be
interested to hear it.  In general, it is more important for an
embedded application to be sure of enough space in which to run.  After
all, you don't want to run out of memory just as you reach a critical
section of control code.

Geoff Barrett
INMOS Limited
Newsgroups: comp.sys.transputer
From: tsw@netcom.com (Tim Walker)
Subject: IS Occam3 recursive?
Keywords: Occam3 recursive
Organization: Netcom - Online Communication Services  (408 241-9760 guest) 
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1992 03:38:35 GMT


 Does anyone know if Occam3 will be recursive? This is a big drawback
in Occam2 when trying to implement things like parallel searchs.

 -- Tim Walker  (tsw@netcom.com)


Newsgroups: comp.sys.transputer
From: rob@pact.nl (Rob Kurver)
Subject: Re: MS-Windows access for transputers
Keywords: MS-Windows, Transputers
Organisation: PACT, Delft, The Netherlands
Cc: rob@pact.nl
Organization: Delft University of Technology
Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1992 14:14:53 GMT

In <1992Nov9.230533.13209@lucrece.robots.ox.ac.uk> tom@robots.ox.ac.uk (Tom Burke) writes:

>	I'm using a PC as a transputer host and was wondering if
>anyone out there in netland have written an extension to ``iserver''
>which allows access to Microsoft Windows facilities?  A public domain
>program would be preferable but any good commercial packages would
>also be of interest.

What we have done with the host server for our PACT Parallel C compiler
is provide support for so-called alternate servers.  An alternate server
communicates with the main server (which is an iserver superset, BTW)
through an MS-DOS software interrupt, which is registered as such with
command line options.  Now when the main server gets a request for an
alternate server, it invokes the alternate server through the interrupt,
passing it the info sent by the transputer, and sending any data returned
by the alternate server back to the transputer.  Transputer runtime
support functions hide the gory details from the user.

With this feature, it is fairly easy to write an alternate server which
provides all the Windows support you're interested in, without having
to mess with the original host server.  With the proper alternate server
you get all the normal host server support plus the extra features
required for a particular application or environment.

Cheers. - Rob

--
     PACT                   Rob Kurver
    Foulkeslaan 87         rob@pact.nl
   2625 RB Delft     ph: +31 15 616864 
  The Netherlands   fax: +31 15 610032
Newsgroups: comp.sys.transputer
From: rob@pact.nl (Rob Kurver)
Subject: Re: Manipulating process workspace on the Transputer
Organization: PACT, Delft, The Netherlands
Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1992 14:16:59 GMT

In <6348@sersun1.essex.ac.uk> aghao@sersun2.essex.ac.uk writes:

>As part of my research, I need to be able to examine the workspace of one or 
>more Transputer processes.  Clearly, this is quite feasible, as I can get hold
>of the Wptr of a process.

>However, as I need to access the workspaces as separate, individual entities,
>I need to know what the boundaries are, ie where each particular process' 
>workspace starts and *ends*.  One possibility is to find out what the size
>of each workspace is, and that is what I am hoping to be able to do.

It is not entirely clear to me what you're looking for, i.e. how you
define the start and end of the workspace.  Are you interested in the
memory reserved for the entire stack of the current thread, or just in
the frame used by the current function invocation?

If the latter, you know the start by loading the Wptr (something
like `__asm ("ldlp 0")'), and you'll have to know a bit about your
compiler system to find out how to find the end.  In general, this
is were any arguments passed to this function are stored, so there
may be some tricks to get this info.  But again, this will most likely
differ (if only slightly) between compilers.  Please send me email
if you'd be interested in the solution for our PACT Parallel C compiler.

>Does anyone out there have any suggestions?  Most of my work is done using 
>GENESYS C, although suggestions with ref. to any other language would be 
>gratefully received.

If you're interested in finding out the start and end of the current
stack for this thread, the solution will depend very much on your
compiler or operating system, as the transputer process itself
stores no such information.  Most decent transputer compilers for
modern languages like C do stack checking in order to allow for
recursion, for which they need to pass some kind of thread
descriptor to each function.  This thread descriptor contains
information about the start and end of the current stack, as well
as info needed to get back to previous chunks of stack.  This info
is most likely given in your compiler documentation.

>	Obi Aghanya

Rob Kurver
PACT Parallel Architecture and Compiler Technology

--
     PACT                   Rob Kurver
    Foulkeslaan 87         rob@pact.nl
   2625 RB Delft     ph: +31 15 616864 
  The Netherlands   fax: +31 15 610032
Newsgroups: comp.sys.transputer
From: dim2@ellis.uchicago.edu (Alexander Dimitrov)
Subject: FAQ for the group?
Reply-To: dim2@midway.uchicago.edu
Organization: University of Chicago Computing Organizations
Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1992 00:20:21 GMT


Hi!

I am news to the group. Is there a FAQ file that i can get, so that i
get to know the group better and not ask things that are known for a
long time?

Thanks in advance. You may answer in email if you prefer

Regards,
Alex
-- 
____________________________________________________________________
Alexander Dimitrov		a-dimitrov@uchicago.edu  (Internet)
tel.(312) 667-1611	   or   a-dimitrov@uchicago      (Bitnet)
__________________
From: wgd@ukc.ac.uk (W.G.Day)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.transputer
Subject: Why Occam3 probably won't be recursive (was: IS Occam3 recursive?)
Keywords: Occam3 recursive, no
Date: 12 Nov 92 10:39:40 GMT
Reply-To: wgd@ukc.ac.uk (Warren Day)
Organization: Computing Lab., The University, Canterbury, Kent.  CT2 7NF, UK.

tsw@netcom.com (Tim Walker) writes:
> Does anyone know if Occam3 will be recursive? This is a big drawback
>in Occam2 when trying to implement things like parallel searchs.

As the adding of recursion would prevent the compile-time-only memory
allocation from being performed (occam programs should never run out of
memory at runtime); I suspect not.

However, having recently implemented the Towers of Hanoi on a processor farm
and quicksort in occam (Tony Hoare's sort algorithm on C.S.P. hardware, hmm),
I found the building of my own stack to hold the details of the recursing on
to be the quite literally the easist part of the whole designing and writing
process, and it's not something I've had to do before.  Doing it all yourself
means you can build a queue instead of a stack and do things breadth-first if
you wish.

> -- Tim Walker  (tsw@netcom.com)

Warren
From: mes3sl@surrey.ac.uk (Shaun Lawson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.transputer
Subject: B014 driver for Sbus/VME
Date: 12 Nov 92 11:52:13 GMT
Organization: University of Surrey, Guildford, Surrey, UK. GU2 5XH


Has anyone out there successfully modified the standard Inmos unix/VME device
driver and iserver, Inmos product IMS S514C, to talk with a B014 via an Sbus
to VME link adpater (Bit3 device) ?

I'm *sure* I've seen this configuration at tradeshows and such like, but Inmos
say they've never tried it. Transtech I know provide similar drivers  (though
presumably more sophisticated) for their MCP500 - but this aint much use since
they dont reveal their source code.

Any help/comments much appreciated.

Cheers,


Shaun.


Shaun Lawson
Dept of Mechanical Engineering
University of Surrey. UK.
tel: 0483 300800 x2376
email: mes3sl@surrey.ac.uk
From: aghao@sersun2.essex.ac.uk
Newsgroups: comp.sys.transputer
Subject: Manipulating process workspace on the Transputer
Date: 11 Nov 92 13:14:25 GMT
Reply-To: aghao@sersun2.essex.ac.uk ()
Organization: University of Essex, Colchester, UK

Greetings.

As part of my research, I need to be able to examine the workspace of one or 
more Transputer processes.  Clearly, this is quite feasible, as I can get hold
of the Wptr of a process.

However, as I need to access the workspaces as separate, individual entities,
I need to know what the boundaries are, ie where each particular process' 
workspace starts and *ends*.  One possibility is to find out what the size
of each workspace is, and that is what I am hoping to be able to do.

Does anyone out there have any suggestions?  Most of my work is done using 
GENESYS C, although suggestions with ref. to any other language would be 
gratefully received.

Thanks,

	Obi Aghanya
	Dept of Computer Science
	University of Essex
	Colchester CO4 3SQ
	UK

PS  Sorry if you have seen this message before, but I don't think the previous
    one got past our server!
Organisation: European Space Technology Centre (E.S.T.E.C)
Date: Monday, 9 Nov 1992 10:55:32 CET
From: <NWHITELE@ESTEC.BITNET>
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn
Subject: Re: The Acorn Blazers..

I wear a blazer ALL the time! I find it helps me concentrate.






                   GRNG
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn
From: dm@cl.cam.ac.uk (Derek McAuley)
Subject: Re: RISC iX origins (was Re: The new Acorn Machine)
Organization: U of Cambridge Computer Lab, UK
Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1992 10:04:12 GMT

In article <10942@baird.cs.strath.ac.uk> gpalmer@cs.strath.ac.uk (Gary J Palmer IE91) writes:
>BSD 4.2??? Bleargh.... And with 4.4 nearly ready for release (I'm a bit out of
>tuch so it may already be out..). 

CUCL is signed up for (and paid for!) a beta test release of 4.4 BSD. It has not
yet been shipped. The notice distributed from Berkeley asking for *testers* goes
to great length to describe how "beta test" the software is. I would suggest it
would be a studpendous achievement for any company to ship a product base on
something that doesn't exist, and rash, even for Acorn, to base a product on
beta test software.

> Personally, i think that RISCiX is overpriced, and comes with too much...

I must admit to never having seen the price for RISCiX by itself; it always
seems to be obscured by the fact that you have to buy a disc or machine at the
same time.

Mac.
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn