In the academic year 2000-2001 CUCPS held the following talks, in the Hopkinson lecture theatre on the New Museums Site.
The Inmos Transputer was a single chip containing a processor, ROM, RAM and IO (in the form of 4 (usually) high-speed serial links), and was thus superficially similar to a microcontroller.
But the processor has a unique architecure and instruction set, and there is support in the microcode for timeslicing between several processes on a single transputer. Alternatively, serveral transputers can be interconnected using the serial links to provide a genuine parallel computer. The devices could thus be used as elements of a reasonably powerful parallel computer, or as a distributed control system for real-world control.
In this talk I intend to describe the architecture and hardware features of the transputer, and describe how these unigue devices were used. If there is sufficient time I may say a little about the instruction set and Occam, the high-level programming language designed for this family of processors.
I will hopefully bring along a few transputer-based processor modules, but I doubt, alas, that it will be possible to have any working demonstrations.
Dr Duell has kindly permitted us to distribute his notes for this talk.
Dr Rutter has kindly permitted us to distribute most of the overheads and photographs he showed in the talk:
Minutes of the AGM of 27 February 2001, which took just five minutes and forty-five seconds, are also available.
Return to CUCPS home page
Return to University of Cambridge home page