cb538@city.ac.uk (ROBERTS M) (09/20/90)
Dear All, Because of the recent interest on Mac/Transputer products I thought that everyone might be interested in some new products announced by Pacific Parallel / Quantum Leap Systems at the York OUG : "Pacific Parallel announces two new products, a high-speed link adapter for the NuBus and a low-cost industry standard transputer module. The new link adapter makes use of the 32-bit wide NuBus to drive four receiving transputer links and four transmitting links simultaneously. The links may be set up to communicate in parallel, receive as an ALT or broadcast data. The driver for the board also includes the capability to perform scatter and gather operations in the form of 2-D channel inputs and outputs. All channel I/O can be filtered with protocols which are implemented using a callback mechanism. This allows complex protocols, including tagged protocols, without incurring the driver call overhead for every field in the protocol. The low-cost module is a size 2 with a 25MHz T805 and 1,2,4 or 8Mbytes of DRAM. The price for the modules are: $595, $695, $895 and $1295 respectively. OEM discounts are available." The interface board seems very different from previous boards. Instead of using a single link adapter memory mapped into host address space the board uses a 32 way crossbar switch (C004 I suppose ??) attached to slots for four TRAMS and some "Interface Logic, Sequencing and data buffers" which drives the NuBus. Twelve spare lines are available from the crossbar. Pacific Parallel claim the board does 8Mb/sec total communication bandwidth and supports "Hardware byte reordering", with a driver for the links supporting PAR, ALT and "Broadcast" modes. A Macintosh driver for the board is supplied in ROM. Also mentioned in the bumph was a usefull looking deskside cage holding up to 64 processors in an 8x8 2-D grid (unpopulated $10 000, populated < $50 000). With the new version 7.0 of the Mac OS (supporting arbitary nos. of processors co-ordinating through a message passing protocol) now available this all looks pretty interesting. Disclamer : Pacific Parallel / QLS have no connection with City University.