Farming: Towards a Rigorous Definition and Efficient Transputer Implementation

The technique of the processor farm has become very widely used for parallelising applications, often being mentioned without reference to any source. The goal of this work has been to put together a complete and rigorous understanding of what the technique can be used for and what is needed in order to arrive at an efficiently farmed application. This paper consists of these two parts. We have shown, via the UNITY theory of programming, that the basic structure of the processor farm may be used to parallelise a much wider domain of applications than has generally been considered. Second, we show by example, how to build efficient implementations for the first generation of INMOS Transputers. This work is new in that it is the first that has been able to test farming harnesses by taking an abstract view of the application. This paper has been written in a semi-"instruction manual" style. Also it should serve as an introduction to the subject. 1 Introduction The processor farm was prop..