parallel lisp on transputers
John Roberts
We have xlisp running on our system, but no parallel version of lisp
(actually we just had to untar and compile xlisp with no changes
to get it to run on our box).
Here's a little speil on our system, in case anyone is interested...
Here is a description of the Cogent Machine overall hardware.
The Cogent Workstation consists of two Inmos T800 transputers, each with
4 Mbytes of RAM, a 90 MByte internal hard drive and an 800K floppy drive.
The monitor is 1024 by 808 by 256 (8 bits per pixel).
A workstation can be connected to one or more computer servers, we call them
"Resource Servers." Resource Servers consist of a backplane with 16 slots.
One slot is dedicated to a communication board to connect to other
Resource Servers or workstations. The other 15 slots can hold processor
boards. Each processor board contains 2 T800's again each with 4 MBytes of
RAM. In addition to bus communication, there is a crossbar switch to
connect links on any two transputers in the Resource Server. The idea is
that short messages will go rapidly over the bus, and longer messages will
go over the serial links. A Resource Server can have up to 30 processors
with 120 Mbyte of RAM. This is in addition to a workstation's 2 processors
and 8 Mbytes of RAM.
It is also possible for multiple workstations to be connected to a single
resource server, so users can share processors. Processors are allocated
in a fashion similar to using "malloc" and "free" memory allocation in C.
When a user aquires a processor, he or she owns it until it is explicitly
relinquished (or until the user turns off their workstation). No other
user has access to another's processors (this decision was made since
the transputer does not have memory protection, this way no other user
can corrupt your memory -- only you can corrupt your memory).
Our operating system is called Qix, "pronounced Quicks", (our Workstation is
called an "XTM Workstation"). It is highly compatible with the POSIX standard
A host of utilities that are normally provided with *IX systems are provided
with our system (such as grep, awk, sed, vi, emacs, diff, more, tar, compress,
etc...).
The underlying communication system implemented is a simplified and extended
version of Yale Linda called "Kernel Linda". This is implemented at a very
low level of our OS (for speed). A full Yale Linda implementation is in
the works, however Kernel Linda also has some extensions not present in
Yale Linda (such as multiple tuple spaces, necessary for our multitasking
environment).
It is possible to write parallel programs using Kernel Linda that use all
the processors available to any one user (for instance a user with a workstation
and a resource server could have up to 32 processors available for his
program).
We also have a very nice windowing package based on Sun's NeWS called "PIX".
PIX is our implementation of NeWS (if you're not familiar with NeWS, its
sort of an extension of Display Postscript).
Languages currently available are C, C++ and Fortran.
John Roberts
robe...@ogcadmin.ogc.edu
"hanging out at Cogent Research, Inc. and the Oregon Graduate Center"
John Roberts
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id AA10887; Mon, 6 Nov 89 09:58:29 PST
Date: Mon, 6 Nov 89 09:58:29 PST
>From: robertsj (John Roberts)
Message-Id: <891106175...@ogcadmin.OGC.EDU>
To: tputer
Subject: parallel lisp on transputers