gdburns@TOAST.TN.CORNELL.EDU.UUCP (01/23/88)
The latest from Cornell: As of 12/21/87 Trillium 1.0 Beta has been in the books. We expect to be installing the system on the T40 and T20 at Michigan Tech. and Clemson respectively within a few weeks. Our short term plan is dig trenches and do little besides support these two universities until the product is stable enough to call it official 1.0. We also plan to look at other transputer systems in the hope that all our portability work will have some purpose. Trillium is an open architecture operating system for a concurrent message passing machine, directly attached UNIX frontends and any UNIX machine capable of reaching a frontend over a TCP/IP network (proven on Vaxes, Goulds and Suns). To the level of message passing and file access, application code is source portable over all participating CPU's. Our intention is to provide a highly functional system by using processes/tasks to implement ALL services outside of the message passing kernel (naturally, we let UNIX and the transputer take care of process scheduling). Another important goal is to foster creative R&D by others; Trillium provides highly flexible development tools and an easy way to add/change/delete the components of the OS. Basically, we have done two years of quality grunt work and left the parallel programming tools to people who know more than we do. The current native (non-UNIX) implementation is for a box of transputers and more specifically, the FPS T-Series. We lose performance on the links (15% - 38%) if you have a machine with no alternate path to the nodes (like the T-Series, but not like some other transputer products). In every other respect, you pick your own form of poison for maximum freedom of expression. Goodies List ============ Penguin C, Fortran, TASM, Linker, Librarian, etc. Create/inquire/kill/spawn processes, complete node to node message passing (block/poll/ack/buffer, you mix 'em up), complete UNIX file system access, stdio, mlib, malloc and friends, more LED control than you want, a transputer simulator, baby debugger, generalized UNIX device driver for FPS Q22 transputer interface card, speech synthesis (requires extra h/w). FPS floating point vector processor library (T customers only). Oh, no Occam here, folks. We're not against it, we just believe in one compiler/one vote. Greg Burns Andy Pfiffer Dave Fielding The Trillium Diving Team "...that's the way a Transputer works, right?"