A transputer-based real-time simulator

Simulation software such as SIMBOL or TUTSIM allows systems to be described in block diagram form on screen. Each block represents a certain computation (often a transfer function) and when the software executes, it carries out the computations sequentially; there is therefore a proportional relationship between problem scale and execution time. However if the blocks are realised in hardware, nowadays digital hardware, this proportionality may be much reduced or may be removed, depending on the degree of parallelism. The authors describe the design of a completely parallel processing system-OMEGA- which is capable of implementing real time simulation on a very wide range of problems and which is much closer to the ethos of analogue computing than is current practice.