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Atari Transputer Workstation
- buescher 6y agoI remember reading about these; I didn't know Atari ever brought it to market. I did personally see a transputer card in a PC running a Mandelbrot demo in that era. EGA graphics! I don't think the person who had that in his office ever got it to do what he originally bought it for, btw. Here's a video; from 1986! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdK3PXKvYgs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdK3PXKvYgs
- agumonkey 6y agoi knew about them but seeing it run is quite shocking
- alexisread 6y agoYes, Atari did, and without the ATW, the Falcon and Jaguar wouldn't have happened. Richard Miller designed the Blossom video card, was hired by Atari to design the Falcon (which contained a cut down blossom), and who in turn hired his ex-Sinclair friends to design the Jaguar. https://atariage.com/forums/topic/212866-atari-sparrow-prototype/page/2/ https://atariage.com/forums/topic/212866-atari-sparrow-proto...
- leashless 6y agoI saw Mandelbrot sets rendering on these in realtime in the late 1980s or very early 1990s. I knew I was seeing the future. Now it all fits on an M1 Mac.
- UncleSlacky 6y agoI saw these too, running on a Meiko Computing Surface containing (IIRC) 64 Transputers when I was at university. We were taught Occam, but weren't allowed to touch the machine itself. Many years later, I found a T-800 in its storage case abandoned in the drawer of my new (to me) desk at a new job - so I kept it.
- hinkley 6y agoI feel like at this point we should be teaching History of Computing in CS programs. The old people cry, "This is all the same (stuff that's been going on forever," the young cry, "This is the future, old man." The truth is somewhere in the middle. "The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed," very much describes the cycles, but I feel like in some ways this was more obvious 15 years ago, when PC evolution was the focus (nowadays it seems like mobility takes up a lot of bandwidth, which is a huge thing that feels small). Things like GPUs hitting a tipping point where some feature that had been around for 4-8 years was now ubiquitous enough that software would assume that it was available - and fast. UI expectations ratchet up almost overnight even though the underlying technology has been simmering for years. This was quite pronounced in the 90's, but continued well into the 00's. Everyone I think can see those, but the epicycles take a bit more study or time. Big architectural changes are driven by cost inequalities in our technologies, and those cycle. Eventually the right somebodies gets fed up and we get SSDs, or 10G Ethernet. Each of those makes some previously abandoned solutions viable again, and they sneak back in (often having to relearn old mistakes). This multiprocessing idea dates back almost to the very beginning of private sector computing. The ILLIAC IV (1975) was intended to scale to 16 cores but some hardware problems capped it at 4 cores. Those processors were 64bit, and connected to ARPAnet a year before the Cray 1 was born. Sequent revisited this idea in the late 80's, early 90's, using Intel x86 processor arrays. We now have a handful of programming languages that have features that could be useful in aggressively NUMA systems (in particular,Scala, Elixir, and Rust). We'll probably see single-box clusters coming around again.
- thaeli 6y agoBetween GPUs and increasing core counts on CPUs, in many ways we've had single-box clusters for a while as normal current-gen workstations.
- dfox 6y agoDuring the last 20 years the typical x86 box went from single CPU, through multiple CPUs, through multiple CPUs with non-trivial NUMA topology to the current state where not having non-trivial NUMA topology is meaningful point in marketing of the thing. The primary reason is that large class of somewhat interesting workloads do not cope well with NUMA and then obviously running such workloads on some kind of weakly coupled cluster is completely impossible.
- abraxas 6y agoI always wondered if we could achieve greater success in server hardware by having boards with truly massive numbers of tiny CPUs all with their own RAM and maybe even individual storage. Since most web apps are very simple at an individual session level having a 1 to 1 mapping between a CPU and a session could provide for a great developer and user experience when building server apps.
- guenthert 6y ago> I always wondered if we could achieve greater success in server hardware by having boards with truly massive numbers of tiny CPUs all with their own RAM You mean like GPGPUs?
- abraxas 6y agoNot familiar with the term. I'll read up on it.
- rbanffy 6y agoOne day I'll design a board with a beefy network switch and a bunch (32, perhaps) of Octavo SiPs (an ARM core, RAM, ethernet, SD reader wires, GPIO in a single BGA package), put a red LED for each module on the edge, stack 32 of those in a translucent box and play with something that, at least, has the same number of blinking lights as a Connection Machine.
- __d 6y agoI always loved the look of the CM1. I wonder if, rather than just a single LED for each CPU, you could use an old eg. 1280x1024 LCD panel instead, so you could set the display to show different configurations of the inter-CPU links for different algorithms?
- rbanffy 6y agoI remember some Crays had a 3D floating bricks load visualization available to the operator. It's sad modern supercomputers are built to be buried in a dark datacenter somewhere nobody can see them.
- reason-mr 6y agoI did my Ph.D. thesis on a Sun 4/110 connected to a VME transputer board and from there into a larger transputer array, using T-800s. Amazing and way ahead of the times - what really killed things was a combination of the removal of financial support by the UK Govt, and also an unexpected increase in the clock frequency of single core CPUs, rendering anything which was not on the latest process out of date. Then the UK went into recession, and many good people left. Some went to the west coast US, other took teaching positions in places like Australia. I do always wonder what could have become of the UK computer industry in the early 90's had it been appropriately funded at the right time (via something like DARPA). But instead, the concentration went into turning London into a financial hub.
- reason-mr 6y agoAnd also - while we are on the subject of british parallel computing - have a look at this : https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F3-540-17943-7_120 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F3-540-17943-7_12... - Cobweb - wafer scale VLSI in 1987
- cesaref 6y agoI attended Bristol Uni's Computer Science department in the late 80s. They had a room of Sun 3s which had transputer cards, which were programmed in occam in a weird folding editor. It was clearly the future, and all programming would look like that in the future (hint, not the one I ended up living in). I also seem to remember seeing a demo of a mandlebrot set being rendered impressively quickly in parallel on a transputer based machine, which I think was a cube shaped machine. A quick look on the web doesn't throw up any obvious hits though.
- criddell 6y agoCould the cube shaped machine be a SGI Iris?
- cesaref 6y agoJust found reference to it on David May's page, which is suitably retro html for the Inmos architect who created occam and did all sorts of interesting things like formally prove their FPU implementation (before formal proofs for that sort of thing were common): http://people.cs.bris.ac.uk/~dave/transputer.html http://people.cs.bris.ac.uk/~dave/transputer.html '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!' Sounds like the machine I remember, a 420 processor machine in a box in the late 80s was quite something.
- wrs 6y agoFrom the manual: “[In the future] a single processor will provide somewhere between a gigaflop and a teraflop of performance. Are there really problems which need such power?” It goes on to list problems like quantum chemistry simulations and weather forecasting. Turns out the answer was...running a web browser.
- siltpotato 6y agoDidn't foresee the inefficiencies and overhead of modern programming.
- shrubble 6y agoSome of the folks ended up being the principals at XMOS (a play on words of InMos), which still has a vaguely transputer-ish design. As well, there is the KROC compiler which allows a variant of the Occam programming language to be run on Linux, OS X and I think Windows. (Mentioning this in case anyone wants to play with the concepts without having a transputer).
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- bitwize 6y agoWith all the talk about attaching CPUs to RAM modules, the transputer may well live again!
- __d 6y agoThere was a multi-vendor standard for Transputer modules called TRAMs: they were a bit shorter and a bit wider than a modern DIMM, and used pins on the short ends rather than PCB fingers. A common TRAM had a CPU and 4MB of RAM. You'd get a bunch of those, maybe a graphics TRAM, a SCSI TRAM, etc, and build a machine using a carrier board with maybe 8 or 10 slots.
- 2sk21 6y agoI wrote a lot of code on a Meiko computing surface in Occam in the late 1980s! Was very hard to get even simple algorithms to run.
- therealcamino 6y agoI never wrote any nontrivial Occam programs, but I took a class around that time in which we wrote Occam code for a 4-Transputer PC add-in board. I remember being excited to try it, and afterwards feeling like "How could you get this to do something useful?" It seemed ambitious, but to me it felt like the programming model was more about having firm theoretical foundations in CSP, than ease of writing programs.
- 2sk21 6y agoI was working towards my PhD in machine learning with neural networks in 1990 and I tried to implement backpropagation in Occam in 1989. But gave up and tried using C* on a Connection machine instead. That did not work out well either so I finally wrote a simple C based implementation that ran distributed on a cluster of IBM RS 6000 workstations ( very well I might add) :-) Parallel computers of the late 80s were a mixed bag - they worked well for a few use cases but in general, they were troublesome and getting access was difficult and expensive.
- mattowen_uk 6y agoLooks like it runs this OS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeliOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeliOS
- __d 6y agoIt did, yes. Helios ran on a bunch of different systems, 68000, Transputer, i960, and later ARM, I think. It was a fun system to program: the server protocol is a bit like Plan9's 9P. It was pretty cool at the time to have all your CPUs, and all your services, linked into a distributed namespace along with your filesystems.
- butterisgood 6y agoThe 9P-like part I found particularly interesting after reading over the seemingly excellent documentation for Helios. I would love to ask Rob Pike if perhaps there was inspiration from Helios for Plan 9, or if they’d arrived at a similar abstraction totally independently. Actually I’ll shoot him an email and see if he answers!
- butterisgood 6y agoRob did reply. He implied that my mentioning Helios may have been the first time he’s heard of it. So, I guess it was just an independently arrived at idea. That’s probably not too surprising I guess.
- __d 6y agoI think it’s likely that they were either independent or the Helios folks had a brief overview of Plan9. While Helios did a lot of quite cool stuff, I don’t think it was as general as 9P. It felt like it was produced by a small number of smart people under a lot of time pressure, while Plan9 felt more like it had a more leisurely research background. I recommend the blue book (vs the black one) for detailed documentation. That plus the book of papers from Perihelion was enough to get servers running.
- pjmlp 6y agoDid you also used the Modula-2 compiler? Was it any good?
- a-dub 6y agointeresting. if i'm reading the wikipedia article about this right, they were essentially SoCs with on-die high speed networking and no shared ram? the ring architecture reminds me a bit of multicore x86...
- __d 6y agoThat's about right, yes. There were 4 x 20Mbps links and you could use them to directly connect to other CPUs (so, a mesh or torus) or to a fabric. The link protocol was very simple. Each CPU had local DRAM, but there usually wasn't much: 1-16MB was typical. Unlike most CPUs, there weren't really registers as such: you had a high-speed stack instead (on die). So an add instruction would pop the top two stack locations, and push the sum.
- jeffbee 6y agoThe rework on the graphics card is killing me. That it was more economical to patch over circuit board design flaws with manual soldering than to re-spin a second revision of the board surprises me.
- ilaksh 6y agoWhat's the difference between a transputer and the latest graphics cards? Also, don't recent CPUs have a lot of engineering to integrate many cores together efficiently? Most high-end CPUs now are 4-16 cores. I suspect that maybe just about every computer today is kind of a transputer.
- jacquesm 6y ago> What's the difference between a transputer and the latest graphics cards? That you could string Transputers together via their links to create an arbitrary topology computing fabric.
- aap_ 6y agoI got to play with one of these two years ago for a bit. Quite a fun machine!
- shaunxcode 6y agoI like to believe the transputer lives on in the various flavors of CSP that are actively in use (GO, core.async etc.)
- tyingq 6y agoThe description of the transputer seems to have a lot in common with the Parallax Propeller, which is pretty popular. https://www.parallax.com/propeller/ https://www.parallax.com/propeller/
- timthorn 6y agoMicroLive had a feature on the Transputer back in the day: https://clp.bbcrewind.co.uk/be4d23d20200fca1b1db963376852c3f https://clp.bbcrewind.co.uk/be4d23d20200fca1b1db963376852c3f
- randomifcpfan 6y agoTransputer (and later Cell) was a bet that SMP with cache coherency would be too difficult to implement. Here’s a long explanation from Linus Torvalds of why we’re not using architectures like Transputer any more: https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=200812&curpostid=200897 https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=200812&curpost...
- benreesman 6y agoMicroservice-by-default architecture is, IMHO, neatly rebutted by the same argument.
- kabdib 6y agoThis came as a complete surprise to the folks at Atari HQ in Sunnyvale. Well, certainly the engineers who were working on the ST and the 8-bit line. It could be that upper management knew. But us worker-bee types, a truly WTF moment. "We announced a new computer!" [collective response:] "WHAT?!" Never got my hands on one. I regret that a little. The Transputer was a seriously interesting architecture. (I was never impressed with Occam, though).
- butterisgood 6y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam-%CF%80 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam-%CF%80 Seems interesting to me.
- __d 6y agoHelios (the OS of the ATW) came with a port of GCC. It was, ironically, hard to use Occam on the ATW. I think you could also get Fortran, Modula2 and Ada compilers for Helios.
- sbisson 6y agoBack in the mid-90s I was running tech at UKOL in Shepton Mallet; in a converted brewery which we shared with Perihelion Software, which was the team that wrote Helios. They were an interesting bunch of smart people who were using Transputers to run some of the first VR gaming rigs. Amusingly Perihelion was founded by many of the folk from compiler company Metacomco, who were mainly Cambridge University computer science folk perhaps best known for the Tripos research OS. Tripos, of course, was commercialised as AmigaOS, and was the basis of Helios. So Atari shipped a computer using the same core OS as the Amiga...
- tibbydudeza 6y agoSometimes I miss Byte Magazine - fortunately our University had it in the library - remember reading about some stuff I could never own (NeXt) or some really oddball approaches that never went anywhere. Like the Lynn Rekursiv.
- __d 6y agoI read the Rekursiv article too! It sounded like a great project.