Eastman Kodak Co company Ektron Applied Imaging Inc, based in Bedford, Massachusetts, has announced its Boss-9000 parallel processor, based on the T9000 Transputer. The system will available in August with prices starting at $45,000 for an entry-level, 12 processor model 9012 with 300 MFLOPS. A 252-processor model 9252, offering 6,300 MFLOPS performance is $630,000. Current Ektron Boss users can upgrade to the Boss-9000 without rewriting application code, the company says. The Boss-9000 can interface with Unix workstations or real-time data acquisition systems via a VMEbus interface. By using 64-bit data transfer rates, the system can achieve rates of over 40Mbps on the VME bus. Each input-output procesor has an extra 4Mb of memory that is accessible from the VMEbus and node. Programmers can access this memory from outside the parallel processor by using memory mapping. Users can scale the Boss system up from a single node to 456 nodes, to give 114.6GFlops performance. The T9000’s built-in communications links enable the internal bandwidth of the parallel processor to expand proportionately to the number of processing nodes. Boss systems are currently used for a range of applications including remote sensing, VLSI wafer inspecton, film editing, element analysis, three-dimensional reconstruction, molecular modelling and print-quality control.
