An astronomical imaging application using transputers

The authors discuss the role of transputers in high-speed, high-volume data processing and describe the software design methodology necessary to support a fully engineered implementation. An advanced microdensitometer, SuperCOSMOS, is currently under development, and provides data at rates of 500 kbytes/s from a linear 2048 element CCD (charge coupled device) array. Particular attention is given to the operation of the current COSMOS machine, the development of SuperCOSMOS, the ported process, topologies, and the interface. Porting of algorithms for the real-time processing required by SuperCOSMOS has proved straightforward, and it seem likely that offline processing will be transferred to another array of transputers in order to exploit the processing power available. Each offline domain will consist of one or more transputers and 24 Mbytes of memory and will have access to those sections of the disk farm not being used for data acquisition. >