karia@delhi.UUCP (Raju Karia xt.57370) (01/29/91)
Mike Moore writes: >Here at BHP we are considering purchasing some i860/transputer TRAMs for doing >floating point intensive calculations on geotechnical data sets. We have >identified two suppliers of apparently suitable hardware, these being Quintek >and Transtech, both UK based companies. If anyone out there has experience with>i860/transputer TRAMs from either of these companies, or any other, .. We've just purchased two i860/transputer TRAMS (TTM100) from Transtech, and will be installing them pretty soon (we're awaiting the arrival of a motherboard and software). The TTM100s each come with a vector library called MathAdvantage from Quantitative Technology Corporation on 5.25 inch diskette for MS DOS (should not cause any problems if transferred to a Sun server, since its all just i860 code). Transtech have added a few files to this library that contain the necessary support kernel and stubs for library calls from 3L C and Fortran. The technical notes from Transtech suggest making library calls to run on the i860 from Fortran running under GENESYS. Thus far, we are uncertain as to whether the i860 nodes can be accessed from GENESYS. Transtech recently informed me that there is now a version of GENESYS that runs on the i860 itself. Here is my most recent query to Transtech, for which I'm awaiting a reply : "Will I be able to use the MathAdvantage library from GENESYS (more specifically, does GENESYS II have stubs equivalent to the 3L C and Fortran stubs in the MathAdvantage library) ?" I'll send more information over the network once we have had all our software and hardware installed. In the meantime, comments from anyone else with experience in using these TRAMs would be greatly appreciated. In particular, we would be interested in knowing of any other programming environments that run on Transtech hardware from which the MathAdvantage library calls to the i860s can be made. Raju Karia, INTEVEP, Apartado 76343, Caracas, Venezuela. voice: +58 2 908 7413 fax: +58 2 908 6447 email: emsca!intevep!karia@sun.com