Transputation: a brief history of Inmos

Re:Transputation: a brief history of Inmos by ColinWright on Thursday August 18, 2011 @06:10AM (#2898667)

I used to program a 96-processor machine. It could do what were for the time some quite amazing things in quite a small package. The interconnections were dynamically reconfigurable, so you could make the mesh of processors match the mesh of your problem (within limits) and avoid bottlenecks getting data from one place to another.

Very cool, very advanced, and no one seemed to "get it."

But it was impossible to get programmers to understand how to write programs for it, and it was impossible to get problem domain experts to write decent programs at all. Every problem people brought to me to get parallelised was trivially re-written to run tens, sometimes hundreds of times faster. It was a solution looking for a problem that never showed up.

I learned a lot from that project, some of which is still in action today, about programming large, multi-processor systems. But I still remember Occam (and its friends (yes, it had friends)) with some fondness.

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Re:Transputation: a brief history of Inmos by ctdonath on Thursday August 18, 2011 @09:39AM (#2899117)

A fascinating system. As a college student I thought it was the coolest concept (and it's still awesome 30ish years later). The immediate obvious problem, and what took it down, was the amount of hardware required and the paradigm shift to use them - not a huge obstacle, but enough to hinder proliferation.

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