Connection Machine
From Free net encyclopedia
←Older revision | Newer revision→
Image:Thinking machines cm2.jpg The Connection Machine was a series of supercomputers that grew out of Danny Hillis's research in the early 1980s at MIT on alternatives to the traditional von Neumann architecture of computation. The CM-1, originally conceived of at MIT, was a "massively parallel" hypercube arrangement of thousands of very simple processors, each with its own RAM, which together executed in a SIMD fashion. The Connection Machine was originally intended for applications in artificial intelligence and symbolic processing, but later found greater success in the field of computational science.
Hillis and Sheryl Handler founded Thinking Machines in Waltham, Massachusetts (it was later moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts) in 1983 and assembled a team to develop the CM-1 and then the CM-2, which, depending on the configuration, had as many as 65,536 processors. The individual processors were extremely simple, processing one bit at a time. The CM-2, launched in 1987, added Weitek 3132 floating-point numeric co-processors to the system, with 32 of the original simple processors sharing each numeric processor. Two later variants of the CM-2 were also produced, the smaller CM-2a with either 4096 or 8192 single-bit processors, and the faster CM-200. Image:Frostburg.jpg Due to its origins in AI research, the CM-1/CM-2 single-bit processor was influenced by the Lisp programming language and a version of Common Lisp, *Lisp (pronounced "Star-Lisp"), was the first language to be implemented on the CM-1. Much system utility software for the CM-1/2 was written in *Lisp. Later, *Lisp would become the central product of the company after it stopped making computer hardware.
With the CM-5, announced in 1991, Thinking Machines switched from the CM-2's hypercube architecture of simple processors to an entirely new MIMD architecture based on a fat tree network of SPARC RISC processors. The later CM-5E replaced the SPARC processors with faster SuperSPARCs.
Connection Machines were noted for their (intentional) striking visual design. The CM-2 was cube-shaped with red blinking LEDs visible over a large portion of the surface. The CM-5, when viewed from above, looked like a lightning bolt, and also had a large panel of red blinking LEDs. Perhaps because of its design, a CM-5 was featured in the movie Jurassic Park in the control room for the island.
Danny Hillis's original thesis paper, on which the Connection Machine was based, is The Connection Machine (MIT Press Series in Artificial Intelligence) (ISBN 0262081571) . The title is out of print as of 2005. The book provides an overview of the philosophy, architecture and software for the Connection Machine, including data routing between CPU nodes, memory handling, Lisp programming for parallel machines, etc.
See also
- Transputer
- FROSTBURG — a CM-5 used by the NSA
References
- Arthur Trew and Greg Wilson (eds.) (1991). Past, Present, Parallel: A Survey of Available Parallel Computing Systems. New York: Springer-Verlag. ISBN 0-387-19664-1.