RE: Occam and the parallel Playstation

[tjoccam@xxxxxxxxxxx]

Hi Eric and all,

Following up your link, I got into an email exchange with Mark Bereit, the
author. Among other things he asked ---

> And separately, can you suggest any good links
> on background to occam and/or the Transputer so
> I can fill in some of my gaps?

Of course there are the Inmos manuals and various tech notes, but they are
hardcopy and presumably out of print. Are they available on line yet? Is
there any equivalent resource online? Just a newbie introduction of the
"Gosh, it's really that simple" kind.

TIA,

Larry Dickson

>
> http://www.embedded.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=186700597
>
>
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> -----------------------------------------------------------
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>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-occam-com@xxxxxxxxxx [mailto:owner-occam-com@xxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of tjoccam@xxxxxxxxxxx
> Sent: Thursday, August 03, 2006 6:48 PM
> To: D.J.Dimmich
> Cc: Chalmers, Kevin; Andrew Delin; occam-com@xxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: RE: Occam and the parallel Playstation
>
> All,
>
> What got me thinking the Cell might be a natural for POP is the
Blachford series -
>
> www.blachford.info/computer/Cell/Cell0_v2.html
>
> That's version 2, fixed after arstechnica's Hannibal attacked it on some
details, but it still has the main points that attracted my attention:
supposedly it requires "concrete programming" and has a very local
resource
> structure. This should be extremely friendly to a CSP/occam
architecture, and not to much else.
>
> Damian, I'd be really interested in being kept in the loop on occam for the
> Cell. (I did try getting the head of research at Sony US interested in a
similar project, and he was interested, but it did not pan out.) I think
you're exactly on the right track to use interrupts (and, I presume,
DMA) to
> implement the primitives. I did something similar long ago with the DOS PC.
> A "default harness" that exploits the fastest characteristics of the
Cell should be possible, if Blachford is at all on the right track.
>
> Larry Dickson
>
>> Hello,
>>
>> Yes, it's true, we are indeed working on a version of the
>> transterpreter for the cell.  We're also looking at generating C and
using the transterpreter core as the runtime for occam programs. While
much of the work is still in the early stages, we do have bits working.
 There are two papers which are going to be part of this years CPA
describing what we have done to date, hopefully by the time we get to
CPA development will have progressed.
>>
>> I'll drop a note to the list when we have something that can be
released, at the moment its still under quite heavy development and
isn't too useful.
>>
>> I'm really happy to see that people are interested in it though, helps
motivate me :).
>>
>> As to the cell's communications system, I don't know about it being
designed with CSP but it can be programmed in a 'csp-friendly' way. The
hardware doesn't enforce any csp-like behaviour, if any of it seems
csp-like then I think thats a coincidence. CSP-ness needs to be done in
software, with a bit of help from interrupts that the hardware can
generate as well as some harware enforcable
>> blocking/non-overwriting communications registers.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Damian
>>
>> On Thu, 3 Aug 2006, Chalmers, Kevin wrote:
>>
>>> The Cell Processor's communication system was also supposedly
>>> designed using CSP.  I do remember reading that the Transterpreter
people (http://www.transterpreter.org
>>> <http://www.transterpreter.org/> ) wanted to use the Cell Processor. If
> they had contact or not I'm not sure.
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>
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