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Flavors Technology Incorporated |
PIM/Paracell Product Summary |
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This chapter describes how Paracell and the PIM help reduce costs and improve productivity by giving tools to engineers which simplify the design, programming, testing, and continuous improvement of complex adaptive systems. The limitations currently hindering the development and deployment of solutions to complex, real-time applications are also discussed.
As the largest of automation and control applications grow increasingly
intricate, conventional solutions result in complex systems that
are difficult to program, inflexible in their complexity, and
difficult to maintain. For example, one automotive manufacturing
company executive estimates that 40% of the cost of a new factory
is software. Not only is this a major expense, but the time to
develop and test this software often limits the rate at which
factories can be brought on line.
![[conventional]](../pix/conventional.GIF)
Figure 2-1. Conventional solutions to complex problems consist of a mixture of many different programming environments.
As software development and management become increasingly difficult, the demand for a dramatic reduction in the number of programmable devices required to implement a solution or system becomes stronger. The hardware and its associated support software must be fast, flexible, and predictable in order to handle large and/or complex real-time problems.
![[curve]](../pix/curve.GIF)
Figure 2.2. By reducing the number of programmable devices, PIM can dramatically reduce the complexity of implementation while providing a platform for future application enhancements.
The capacity of the PIM to control massive, tightly coupled problems using a single language while reducing considerably the required number of computer platforms results in simplicity and significant cost savings.
Paracell is an intrinsically parallel language for control, simulation and automation. It is based on a systolic real-time control model, making the creation of real-time control elements such as timers, counters, and PID loops trivial. Engineers and plant personnel alike are able to understand and write Paracell code with little or no training.
2.a Ease of Use
Paracell is easily taught to a broad range of engineers, developers or staff. Control Engineers write Paracell code and interact with the PIM via programming workstations, and factory floor terminals. Each programming workstation is equipped with a large color monitor, keyboard and mouse. The user interface tools that make up the Paracell development environment are powerful, intuitive, and make full use of the workstation's features.
2.b Productivity
From its beginning, Paracell was designed as a high-level, simple to use, parallel language to program real-time applications quickly. This strategy of designing a language to match an application has driven many advances in programming productivity. For example, in the 1960's Fortran, an early high-level language, made computing available to the engineer by replacing assembly language with mathematical-style formulas. In the 1980's, the personal computer spreadsheet had a similar impact on the business professional by converting a natural business language, the accounting spreadsheet, into a computing language. The idea behind Paracell was to deliver to the control engineer the features of a high-level language and the ease-of-use of application specific tools.
Paracell draws on the technology of expert systems and automation languages such as ladder logic. It also uses powerful control statements such as IF...THEN...ELSE... rules to substantially reduce the code required to program a solution. For example, the Paracell statement:
![[tile]](../pix/tile.GIF)
Figure 2-3. Example Paracell statement.
requires just seconds to write, is easily understood, and, once loaded into the PIM, is executed at a fixed systolic rate. In a conventional programming language, such as FORTRAN or C, much more code is required to perform the same task, and even more code is required to invoke it at regular intervals.
2.c Project Management
Project management and code documentation have become increasingly important as the size and complexity of systems have grown. To this end, Flavors has developed the Paracell Navigator environment, an innovative project management and project development environment that helps implement large projects smoothly.
First and foremost, the Navigator is easy to use and intuitive. The Navigator organizes an application in a natural manner, helps the system architect divide the program among multiple developers, helps individual programmers organize their work, and automatically documents authors, revision dates and code/data relationships for each segment of code and each variable created (variables are named data points, and memory locations containing data, and are described fully in sections 3.4 and 4.2). Paracell application developers (authors) working on a project only need to know how other authors have named their data, not how each task was programmed. The only connection between segments of the program is through data.
Running on a development workstation, the Paracell Navigator provides a 3-D view of a Paracell program and guides the user through the problem, managing the database of authors, code, and variables; loading the PIM system, and providing access to other Paracell tools.
The PIM is ideal for deployed applications where real-time responses are needed and downtime must be minimized. Real-time control requires supercomputer-class performance, direct I/O, and predictability. Flavors' delivers this performance with a new parallel architecture that directly implements Paracell, a new and unique language designed for the PIM.
3.a Performance
Flavors has created an automation system capable of controlling the massive automation problems that are difficult or impossible to solve by traditional means. The Parallel Inference Machine is the most powerful control system available.
"Top of the line" industry standard microprocessors are combined and run in parallel to provide a scalable solution. PIM platforrms are scalable from as few as 125 "processors" to in excess of 16,000 "processors." Typically, PIM processors run at a fixed rate of 60Hz. For less time-critical applications, PIM processor execution can be varied to 30Hz or slower, allowing the most efficient use of processors.
In its maximum configuration, a powerPIM system has 4 Motorola powerPC604e microprocessors, and 64 megabytes of memory. A PIM system may also include a 20 megabyte per second I/O channel. This performance enables the large complex problems to be solved from a single machine, resulting in control simplicity and significant cost savings. For even greater performance, multiple PIM systems may easily be clustered.
3.b Dependability
The PIM is implemented on industry standard, commercially available board-level components that are available from multiple vendors. The PIM is housed in an industry standard VME card chassis so that a wide selection of support devices and equipment are available from third party sources.
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