paul@amos.ling.ucsd.edu (Paul Smith) (12/04/88)
Computer Systems Architects is working on, and I believe has, a proto-type of a VME board which will support 4 transputers and a crossbar switch. The board is supposed to have buffers for each of the transputers and separately mappable registers for each of the transputers so you could do DMA to each of the transputers on the board. Also I believe that they intend to provide interrupts on the VME bus for i/o. Sounds like it'll beat the pants off our B011. Our contact with C.S.A. is: Glen Lowery (801)374-2300 Provo Utah, U.S.A. csa@adam.byu.edu P.S. We have several of their P.C. boards hanging off our B011 in our sun and are very pleased with the performance and price of their boards. =============================================================================== Paul Smith Internet: paul@amos.ling.ucsd.edu UUCP: ...ucbvax!sdcsvax!amos!paul Bitnet: pssmith@ucsd.bitnet
jevans@.ucalgary.ca (David Jevans) (12/05/88)
In article <5622@sdcsvax.UCSD.EDU>, paul@amos.ling.ucsd.edu (Paul Smith) writes: > Computer Systems Architects is working on, and I believe has, a > proto-type of a VME board which will support 4 transputers and a > crossbar switch. > Our contact with C.S.A. is: > Glen Lowery > (801)374-2300 > Provo Utah, U.S.A. > csa@adam.byu.edu We have been looking into the CSA boards and VME board for SUNs. I talked to CSA on friday for about an hour and it seems that their SUN VME board is in the final stages of development and will be ready for delivery in early january. I thought that they were simply providing a VME board (with 1 transputer, probably a T212 or T222). No crossbar switch etc was mentioned. (Topologix sells boards like that). I was scheduled to go down to CSA on friday to take a look at their operation, but I got a call at 7:00am saying that our contact, who I believe was Glen Lowery, was no longer with the company. You'd better call and find out for yourself. David A. J. Jevans Jade Simulations International #80, 1833 Crowchild Trail N.W. Calgary, Alberta Canada T2M 4S7 David Jevans, U of Calgary Computer Science, Calgary AB T2N 1N4 Canada uucp: ...{ubc-cs,utai,alberta}!calgary!jevans
paul@amos.ling.ucsd.edu (Paul Smith) (12/06/88)
jevans@.ucalgary.ca (David Jevans) writes: > I talked to CSA on friday for about an hour and it seems that > ........ > they were simply providing a VME board (with 1 transputer, probably > a T212 or T222). No crossbar switch etc was mentioned. (Topologix > sells boards like that). It was my understanding, that the CSA board was actually going to provide 4 links on the VME bus for 4 anythings, probably transputers. Also they were to provide a 5th link which could accommodate a crossbar switch. Their board itself doesn't come with any transputers, just the link adapters and buffers for them. You could independently talk to the crossbar switch from the VME bus, which would allow you to reconfigure your transputer network. On each of the links you could hang either 1 transputer or a network of transputers. In my original posting I forgot to mention that PARSYTEC also advertises VME boards. I don't know much about them but I have tons of their literature. In the United States they are represented by: CNC Marketing (312) 879-7003 (I've talked with Randy Cochran, about 6-12 months ago). ============================================================================== Paul Smith Internet: paul@amos.ling.ucsd.edu UUCP: ...ucbvax!sdcsvax!amos!paul Bitnet: pssmith@ucsd.bitnet
braner@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu (Moshe Braner) (12/07/88)
[] If what you want is transputers hooked onto a Unix system, then an alternative to VME is the Apollo 3x00 series workstations. They have IBM-PC compatible slots. Since it would be Unix rather than MS-DOS, one would need to write a Unix device driver to support I/O to/from the board(s) in the multi-tasking environment. (If anybody has done that for the Apollo I'd like to hear about it!) In that context it would help a lot if the transputer board would support interrupts and DMA. As far as I know, Microway and Definicon do not, but the CSA boards do. The Inmos B008 does, but the B004 does not. I'm not sure about Parsytec. Any others? - Moshe Braner PS: I do hope Niche is revived!