WoTUG 19 CONFERENCE

March 31st to April 3rd 1996

Nottingham Trent University, UK

INTRODUCTION

The concept of transputers and transputing has outgrown the confines of a single manufacturer. Many companies are marketing highly parallel systems which to a lesser or greater extent are following transputer principles. These principles are relevant to all types of processing - from high performance super computing to single processor micro-controllers in embedded systems.

The transputer principles are:

communication is as fundamental as arithmetic and has a cost of the same order of magnitude;
parallelism is as fundamental as looping for structuring designs and has a cost of the same order of magnitude.

It is proving difficult to build efficient high-performance computer systems simply by taking very fast processors and joining them together with very high bandwidth interconnect. Apart from the need to keep the computational and communication power in balance, it is also essential to reduce communication start-up costs (in line with increasing bandwidth) and to reduce process context-switch time (in line with increasing computational power). Failure in either of these regards leads to coarse-grained parallelism, which results in insufficient parallel slackness to allow efficient use of individual processing nodes, potentially serious cache-coherency problems for super-computing applications and unnecessarily large worst-case latency guarantees for real-time applications.

Transputer principles impose no constraints on the granularity of process and communication. They give us the chance to design systems the ways the problems demand and produce implementations that scale efficiently in line with problem size and processor/communication resource. They are certainly worth checking out.

The novel angle recently demonstrated is that it has become possible to transfer these ideas efficiently on to many other architectures - creating virtual transputers.

Submissions to WoTUG-19, the 19th Technical Conference of the World occam(*) and Transputer User Group discuss the principles highlighted above and report on recent developments that have occurred in this area.

The Conference Proceedings will be published by IOS Press as part of their Concurrent Systems Engineering series. Listed on a separate sheet is the papers which will be presented at the conference

CONFERENCE ORGANISER

Dr B.C. O'Neill
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Nottingham Trent University
Burton Street
Nottingham
NG1 4BU

tel: +44 115 948 6044 (secretary: 0115 9418 418 extension 2799)
tax: +44 115 948 6567
email: eee3oneilbc@ntu.ac.uk

The Conference Proceedings will be published by IOS Press as part of their Concurrent Systems Engineering series.

    http://www.wotug.org/wotug19/

(*) all trademarks and registered names are acknowledged.