An invitation to researchers and engineers to attend
The 19th Technical Meeting of WoTUG
Hosted by The Nottingham Trent University
31st March - 3rd April, 1996
General information
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.
Conference location
The conference will be hosted by Nottingham
Trent University at the University's Clifton
Campus. The centre has excellent facilities and is situated on the
outskirts of Nottingham close to the motorway and is easily accessible
by road and rail.
Nottingham is recognised as a world centre for innovation in computing,
with the National Computing Centre, national super-computing facilities,
a regional high-performance computing centre, and the national archive
for the history of computing situated in the city.
Nottingham is famous
for its Castle, Sherwood Forest and Robin Hood and is an exciting place
to visit with many
tourist attractions. Nottingham has excellent road and rail links and
also good regional East Midlands Airport at Castle Donnington.
The program of events
The conference will comprise a number of different activities, including:
-
An Invited speaker to talk about the development
of the innovative new processor, the T450
-
Single-stream presentation of refereed papers.
Participants at the meeting will receive a copy of the published proceedings;
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Special Interest Groups, including:
Hardware, Tools, Education and Training, Artificial Intelligence, Graphics
and Visualisation, Numerical Methods, Real-time and Safety-critical Systems;
Formal Methods.
-
An exhibition of Transputer based equipment,
software, and literature;
-
A panel session, discussing technical, political, and economic questions
raised by participants.
-
After conference visit to be arranged.
The conference has a strong tradition of academic discussion, balanced
by a warm and enjoyable social aspect.
The full program is available here
Registration information
Further information
If you would like to participate in the meeting please fill in one of the
registration forms and sent it to the meeting organiser (address below).
Should you have any queries please contact the meeting organiser:
Brian 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)
Fax: +44 115 948 6567
email: Brian.Oneill@ntu.ac.uk
http://wotug.ukc.ac.uk/
(*) all trademarks and registered names are acknowledged.