David May's Transputer Page
From 1979 I worked in Bristol as the architect of the Inmos transputer and
still have a large collection of material about the design, the products
and the associated programming language occam which I designed alongside
the transputer instruction set.
I am often asked about the history of Inmos and the transputer, so I have
started to put together these pages. For the moment, here are a couple
of photographs:
B0042 board
C104 board
The B0042 board contains 42 transputers connected via their links into a
2-dimensional array. A number of them were built following a manufacturing
error - all of these transputers were inserted into the packages in the
wrong orientation so were fully functional but unsaleable. I had them all
(around 2000) written off for engineering use and we built the B0042
'evaluation' boards! Many of these were given to Southampton University
where they were assembled into a 1260 processor machine and used for
experimental scientific computing. Inmos used them in a number of
exhibitions (in a box of 10 boards - 420 processors) drawing Mandelbrot
sets in real time!
The C104 board contains one of a very small number of C104 message routing
chips. This chip was originally developed alongside the T9000 transputer
with its dynamic message routing architecture although in fact it was designed
as a component for building interconnection networks (switching fabrics) in general.
It had 32 100Mbit bidirectional links internally connected via a full crossbar.
The transport protocol on the links was standardised as IEEE1355 and also
used in IEEE1394 (Firewire). Routing was done using an interval-labelling
technique with short message headers.
There was support for hot-spot avoidance in large networks using randomisaton.
I think the C104 was the first switch chip designed in state-of-the-art
VLSI (around 2 million transistors). Unfortunately very little effort
was available to market and support this chip and very few were made -
I think most of them were on development boards like this one.
My homepage is here