RE: Occam-Tau - the natural successor to Occam-Pi

["Bernhard H.C. Sputh" <bernhard.sputh@xxxxxxx>]

Dear Beau Webber,

On Thu, September 27, 2012 19:21, J.B.W.Webber wrote:

> However for my sins these days I spend quite a bit of my time writing VHDL
>  for the FPGA based instrumentation I design for my experiments.
> And I keep looking at the concept of the multiple soft processors with
> fast interconnection links that can fit on these chips.


> Is there any possibility of any of these Occam related parallel languages
> being of use for sitting inside / generating code for these soft
> processors, on a reasonable time-scale ?

During my time in Aberdeen, we've done a port of libCSP to the Xilinx
Microblaze and Xilinx PPC405 (Virtex 4 chip), and linked multiple
Microblazes using Fast Simplex Links. This worked reasonably well, and one
could stay in the C-Environment, but still have CSP channels, see [1,2].

Since then I've moved on to work for Altreonic NV, where I concentrate on
supporting heterogeneous distributed systems using OpenComRTOS [3,4] (in
house RTOS), which comes with it's own development environment. We there
use our own "Interacting Entities" paradigm which was heavily inspired by
CSP, we call it a pragmatic superset of CSP.

OpenComRTOS can utilise any kind of processor with a decent C-Compiler,
we ported it to the Xilinx Microblaze, ESA Leon3, ARM-Cortex-M3, and also
the XMOS XS-1, among others. Currently, due to customer demand, our focus
has shifted to the more powerfull CPUs / RoCs (Rack on a Chip) such as the
TI-C6678 (8 Cores at 1.25GHz).

Furthermore, it can utlise any kind of decent comunication technology, to
establish a Link between Processors (Nodes), including RS-232, X-Link,
shared memory, TCP-IP over Ethernet. Communication between Nodes is made
transparent to the user, thus he does not have to bother about it in it's
application code.

To give an example of the power of the OpenComRTOS-Suite, I usually give
our customers a demo where I create a simple application, distributed over
an ARM-Cortex-M3 Node and an Win32 Node, in less than ten minutes,
including explanations.

Feel free to contact me directly if you want to know more. I'll be glad to
 assist you.

Cheers
Bernhard Sputh

[1] http://www.wotug.org/paperdb/send_file.php?num=164
[2] http://www.wotug.org/paperdb/send_file.php?num=209
[3] http://www.altreonic.com/content/product-overview
[4] http://www.wotug.org/papers/CPA-2009/Sputh09/Sputh09.pdf