rainer@hibachi.colorado.edu (Rainer Malzbender) (04/11/90)
I'm not a regular reader of this group, so forgive me if much of this has been answered; if so, email would be appreciated. We are planning a transputer project for physics simulations (molecular dynamics). It seems to me that individual transputers are pretty cheap these days (less than $100 for T800's ?) whereas complete boards are pretty pricey. Hence we are thinking of rolling our own, especially since T-8's seem pretty easy to interface, perhaps using a PC or a Sun as a front end. I have lots of hardware and software experience, but not with transputers. Q1: Is this a reasonable idea ? It seems that if I buy something like a B008 for the PC and hang my own transputer box onto that, and get the standard PC software package, that I should be able to write code for the thing. Q2: How much does the TDS care about hardware configurations ? Q3: What is the software platform of choice for a PC or Sun-3/110 ? Finally, we are worried about obsolescence when the H1 comes out. Q4: How will mips and mflops of the H1 compare with the T800 ? Q5: Should I wait for H1's to come out, or can I build something in the next six months and then add H1's to it ? Q6: If we wanted high-performance graphics, should we use a dedicated transputer, or use the host (i.e., Sun, Iris, etc.) ? Many thanks for the bandwidth, any and all email responses welcome. -- Rainer M. Malzbender Just another Unix/C demagogue. Dept. of Physics (303)492-6829 rainer@hibachi.colorado.edu U. of Colorado, Boulder, USA malzbender@opus.vaxf.colorado.edu