Why not compose a 3, 6, 12 year business plan and approach Nvidia for a 20-49% stake in ownership? Show up at the HN Taipei meet-up and ask around? They had $40B plus to acquire ARM. What if the transputer concept can lower the W-budget for genuine-ai? Without leaving the UK you could ask around Man. U. there's an ARM lab there.
Right. For pipeline hardware, the per-CPU resources have to be well matched to the problem. You have to cut up the problem into bite-size pieces that are the right size for the compute and memory of the little processors. Audio, yes; sonar, yes; cellular problems such as weather prediction and finite element analysis, maybe. The PS3/Cell ran into that problem, which is why later Playstations are more conventional.
Exotic parallel architectures: you can build it, but will they come? Usually, no. You need some widely used case that partitions to match the hardware. GPUs and Bitcoin mining are the big successes so far. Machine learning has that property. Successes in this area tend to come from needing to solve a specific problem at scale.
I did a lot of work with transputers and occam in the 1980s and wrote an OS for a machine that used them. The exposure to the CSP way of thinking was a blessing. occam-2 on the other hand was a little too primitive.
I remember when Inmos marketing came up with "We wanted to make occam the FORTRAN of parallel processing". My response was "You have." (a reference to occam-2 having only static arrays and no concept of a record/struct)
> occam-2 having only static arrays and no concept of a record/struct
Which is remarkable since Tony Hoare is actually also the inventor of the records concept. In the corresponding publication in the Algol Bulletin 21 from 1965 there is even a quote by Occam ;-)
Very interesting OS that is FOSS now. By v3 it ran on multiple CPU architectures. With some of the manycore CPUs appearing in recent years, this is crying out for a revival.
The name of the complete system is called Ares, and Helios is a small component of that. Essentially, to most people, it's an implementation detail/internal codename that will not really see much use for marketing efforts.
It does not look like the other Helios project is going anywhere, so I'm not too concerned with the naming conflict right now.
The other "Helios" project was a commercial operating system from Perihelion Software, which was subsequently kinda open sourced after the company went bust (which is the GitHub repo posted).
There are a couple of books about it from Prentice-Hall: ISBN 0-13-381237-5 and ISBN 0-13-386004-3, plus various academic papers, commercial software for the OS (mostly development tools), open source software (X11, gcc, other stuff), etc, etc.
It too was a micro-kernel, with a very Plan9-like global name system implemented by applications plugging into the name server protocol.
If nothing else, it might be of interest to read up on it, but given the similarities between the projects, it seems to be an unfortunate naming collision.
They had a functioning compiler and decided to concentrate on other areas and it's not too uncommon for a languages's compiler to NOT be written in that language. Afterall Rust relies on the non-Rust LLVM.
Same area, many of the same people, but at a different studio, FAME. MSS was a spin off due to various "fights". I did some recording, with Spooner and David Hood, at both places, a few years back. I really liked FAME, the room is fantastic but MSS has a great vibe.
Did some recording there a couple of years back. Not a bad room but the studio itself is mostly a museum these days and our engineer had to do a bit of work to get it functioning well enough for our purposes. In the area there are a number of great studios, e.g. Fame, Nutthouse but MSS is closer to a really, really good fried chicken place!
