RE: Transputer - schools

[J.B.W.Webber <J.B.W.Webber@xxxxxxxxxx>]

That sounds excellent.
I am, right now, part way through building the UKC Kroc installation on a Raspberry Pi - one that already has the aplc array software compiled and running on it. If this works :
I aim, with the permission of Peter and the Kent group, to add this to the list of software I will make available on pre-configured plug-in SD cards (with OS) for the Raspberry Pi, at a slight mark-up over the cost I will have to pay someone to sit there making copies of the SD card.
Cheers,
	Beau

-----Original Message-----
From: Larry Dickson [mailto:tjoccam@xxxxxxxxxxx] 
Sent: 26 June 2013 16:28
To: J.B.W.Webber
Cc: Richard Dobson; occam-com@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Transputer - schools

Beau and Tony,

I think "occarm" and channel-to-native mapping for Epiphany, etc, are great ideas. The key is to present something people can hack with - using "ordinary" tools with a little boost. Thus, occam functions (at least at first) as pseudocode. The hummocks in the path are:

(1) establishing communication superstructure
(2) loading executable code
(3) assemble resources and start
(4) communicate and run
(5) shut down cleanly and return resources

and communication channels/links should be EXTREMELY general so people can do real stuff.

If anyone is interested, I am going to try to launch a Kickstarter project to do some of this. Go to

http://www.LAZM.org

and follow the "Kickstarter draft link". (It's not live yet, only a preview.)

Larry

On Jun 26, 2013, at 4:37 AM, J.B.W.Webber <J.B.W.Webber@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Sympa,pkg125 [mailto:sympa@xxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Richard Dobson
> Sent: 26 June 2013 10:17
> To: occam-com@xxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: Transputer - schools
> 
> On 26/06/2013 08:21, Tony wrote:
> ..
>> 
>> Maybe what we need is "occarm" for the Raspberry PI?
>> 
>> 
> 
> That would be a great thing to have. Of course the R-Pi already has a parallel processor in the form of the built-in GPU (in the Broadcom chip). Unfortunately there is little scope for programming it directly. 
> Not exactly CSP-ready, but there are many important/interesting massively-parallel tasks which could be explored. If Broadcom could be persuaded to provide some low latency GPU-based FFT operations, and maybe a few other vector-based arithmetic ops, I am sure a phase vocoder could be got to run in real time on the R-Pi, with enough spare CPU to do some interesting things (such as pitch shifting) with it.
> 
> Richard Dobson
> 
> __________________________________________
> 
> On 26/06/2013 08:21, Tony wrote:
> ..
>> 
>> Maybe what we need is "occarm" for the Raspberry PI?
>> 
> 
> That would be great. 
> For the Raspberry Pi and Adaptva Parallella we are talking standard Linux host - so presumably quite simple I would have thought.
> What will probably be significantly harder is porting Occam so it can say run in the Adapteva multi-cpu Epiphany chips.
> 
> It is to Occam that I look for providing a "harness" in which to embed concise/agile array processing nodes.
> So questions arise : 
> 
> How difficult will it be to link the communication channels provided by such an Occam harness in a multi-core processor to the pipe input/output of the array processing nodes at each core ?
> 
> How difficult will it be to use the communication channels in a Beowulf Cluster from Occam ?
> Cheers,
> 	Beau Webber
> 	www.Lab-Tools.com
> 
>