Perihelion Software Ltd, based in Shepton Mallet, Somerset, has announced Release 1.2.1 of Helios, the Unix look-alike parallel operating system that has been around for years but is now being developed ultimately for a new European design of supercomputer. Helios is being developed by an international team of programmers in Shepton Mallet as part of a research project being funded by a grant from the UK Department of Trade & Industry’s Eureka fund, from which Perihelion has received UKP567,000. The company has bought two new supercomputers with the grant – both are Transputer-based systems built around Inmos’ T800 series chips. The MultiCluster system from Aachen, Germany-based Parsytec GmbH, and the T.Node system from Telmat Informatique in Alsace, France, have between them 44 processors and 176Mb of RAM, and can do around 4 MIPS. The research project is also aimed at developing the software for the new Inmos Ltd T9000, or H1, Transputer chip. Prototype T9000-based machines should be available by early next year, Perihelion reckons. The T9000 communication bandwidth is increased 10-fold over the T800, and uses packet switching networks instead of old linking system. Communication routing algorithms will be handled by the hardware, so that every T9000 will be about as powerful as 10 existing Transputers. Helios, which has been commercially available since 1988, uses a job control language called Component Distribution Language to support parallel processing in any high level language, so that existing programs written in C or Fortran can be applied across Transputers in parallel, and programmers can continue writing in languages with which they are familiar.
