INMOS Transputer

Transputers. At higher levels of coimectedness there is a wide variety of parallel computers. A great many parallel computers have been built using INMOS Transputer chips. Individual Transputer chips mn at 2 MELOPS or greater. Transputer chips have four communication channels, so the chips can readily be intercoimected into a two-dimensional mesh network or into any other interconnection scheme where individual nodes are four-coimected. Most Transputer systems have been built as additions to existing host computers and are SIMD type. Each Transputer has a relatively small local memory as well as access to the host s memory through the interconnection network. Not surprisingly, problems that best utilize local memory tend to achieve better performance than those that make more frequent accesses to host memory. Systems that access fast local memory and slower shared memory are often referred to as NUMA, nonuniform memory access, architecture. 

Although Occam is very close to being the machine language of the INMOS Transputer, it has not been widely used except on machines based on transputers (e.g., Meiko CS-1, Parsytec, Telmat). In the 1980s, many transputer-based machines were purchased or built by research groups as a (then) very cost-effective source of computer cycles. 

As part of their efforts to employ parallel computers for molecular dynamics simulations, Schulten and co-workers generated a series of MD benchmarks based on their own program on a wide range of machines, including an Apple Macintosh II, a Silicon Graphics 320 VGX, a 32K-processor Conneaion Machine CM-200, a 60-node INMOS Transputer system, and a network of Sun workstations (using Linda).2 8 j e benchmarks demonstrated that the program runs very efficiently on many platforms (e.g., at sevenfold Cray 2 processor speed on the CM-200 and at Cray 2 processor speed on the Transputer system). 

The processors which we are using in this work are INMOS transputers A transputer is a 10 MIP RISC processor (a 10 milhon instructions per second reduced... 

A spectral simulation was performed on an NEC 9801 personal computer equipped with a transputer (INMOS, UK) using the SLFDIP program, which is written in FORTRAN 77 language based on the theory described by Naito et... 

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