Londonbased Parsys Ltd, which was spun out from Thorn EMI Plc in March (CI No 1,377), has launched Tiny, a set of high level software tools for programmers developing applications for Parsys’ SuperNode 1000 Series machines. Parsys machines use parallel processing and are based on Transputer chips, the number of which varies according to the application being run on it. According to Parsys, Tiny will save programmers time by supporting synchronous and asynchronous communications across any parallel Transputer network. In effect it will enable each task to send a message to another simply by name, rather than programmers having to write their own communications primitives for message passing between separate processing elements of the program. Two versions of Tiny are available, one for high-level languages and one for Occam under TDS. Tiny will be licensed to SuperNode 1,000 users at UKP1,000 for systems of up to 32 Transputers, after which it will be graduated according to the number of Transputers up to a maximum price of UKP2,000.
