Low cost flight simulation based on transputer networks

Design tools based on heuristic algorithms for mapping mixed real-time simulations onto networks of transputers have been developed and tested on a real aircraft simulation model as well as trial data. The algorithms developed are applicable to networks with tens of transputers but have not been tried on massively parallel tasks. No difficulties were encountered in implementing the F106B model except for the fact that the tasks associated with look-up of aerodynamic derivative data dominated the work load. The efficiency obtained with a 4-transputer network was at a reasonable level of 86% which reflects the time lost by inter-transputer communications and waiting time. Application of these techniques to commercial flight simulators cannot proceed until an efficient means of communication between the network and the other key elements of a flight simulator has been devised, possibly using multiport memory for selected transputers in the net