On programming transputers to capture Ada multitasking for the NPS autonomous underwater vehicle.

This thesis is in support of the on-going Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) project at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. This work investigates the development of a transputer-based multiprocessor and how to program it using Ada. The objective is to create a software layer that enables intertask communication over a network of transputers to be location invariant and to make the communication process transparent to the user. Ada, being a concurrent high level language, was chosen as the language in which this software layer is to be written. The method of intertask communication developed here captures the Ada rendezvous semantics, provides reliable and efficient delivery of messages between tasks regardless of their locations, and uses a common message format for all communicating tasks. The location invariant property makes the software layer particularly suitable for developing higher level allocation algorithms. The communication is handled by generic tasks common to each transputer and a common mapping function that has the locations of all the tasks. The programmer needs only to conform to a common format of communication when sending messages between tasks and not be concerned with the actual delivery of the message. The software developed was successfully tested and its performance analyzed for a five transputer ring network using the AUV-II data-flow diagram.