As well as Chorus Systemes SA, Paris, and Portuguese research institute INESC, Lisbon, French manufacturer Gipsi SA has seven other partners collaborating in its effort to develop a European workstation based on Cypress Semiconductor’s 33MHz implementation of Sun Microsystems’ Sparc RISC processor, a project part-funded by the European Commission’s Esprit programme. Gipsi and INESC’s Basic WorkStation module is rated at 22 MIPS and 3.5 MFLOPS, and will come with up to 64Mb RAM and an optical disk drive. The workstation will incorporate a Co-processor Communication System – CCS – for integrating various application-specific hardware modules on which the project partners are working. The CCS, based on Chorus’ multi-processing, distributed version of Unix and the Multibus II transport protocol, includes a driver toolbox called the Procurator designed by Siemens AG, which is built around a general purpose processor board. A graphics co-processor engine – Grace – includes a three-dimensional geometry and rendering, image-generation subsystem designed by Siemens and FhG-AGD, Darmstadt, Germany, and an object-oriented Interaction Framework dubbed IF, based on an extended version of X Window developed by the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory’s User Interface Design Group in Didcot, Oxfordshire. A Fortran paralleliser, which adapts sequential programs to run in parallel, is being developed by Bull DR PA in Paris. Siemens and Brunel University’s Department of Electrical Engineering & Electronics, Uxbridge, Middlesex, are working on an electronic simulation accelerator, ESimAc, a subsystem based on multiple Transputers for speeding up computer-aided design applications. And Grupo APD SA, Madrid, is working on TBSQL, a distributed database for technical applications, which consists of an object-oriented SQL server running on top of the Chorus operating system. A geometric modelling system application exploiting Grace and the Fortran paralleliser has already been developed for the database – and the computationally intensive software can also be used as a tool for benchmarking other systems, the group says. The workstation is due to be completed in March.
