Inmos Ltd has won approval from the European Commission to turn the Esprit-funded Harmony project into a commercial product, in partnership with Paris microkernel vendor Chorus Systemes SA and parallel computer specialist Archipel SA of Annecy-le-Vieux, France. The Geneva-based CERN Centre for European Research into Nucleonics Laboratories and Scheidt & Bachmann GmbH were also involved in the project, which aimed at producing a parallel, real-time Unix environment for the Inmos chip. First commercial products should be out by year-end. First reference system is Archipel’s Volvox Multiple Instruction-Multiple Data parallel processor, but the system is expected to be implemented on a wide range of Transputer-based systems, currently using T4 and T8 chips, and in future the T9000. One reason for the slow take-up of the Transputer has been lack of standard system software as a base for developers.
