A design environment for transputer systems development

The Auto-G toolset and associated graphical language G is marketed as a general-purpose environment which can be used during the development of high-integrity real-time systems. Transputers are a family of high performance microprocessors with a RISC-like instruction set, whose architecture readily supports the construction of large parallel processing networks of varied topology. Although suitable for most microprocessor-type tasks, the performance of transputer networks particularly lends them to the solution of modern real-time processing problems. The paper reports on the initial phases of an investigation into the applicability of Auto-G for the development of high-integrity real-time software systems based on transputer networks. To demonstrate the effectiveness of Auto-G, a trial problem, that of the dining philosophers, has been developed from within the Auto-G environment and, subsequently, executed on a transputer machine