Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wasatch!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!super!cfreese
From: cfreese@super.ORG (Craig F. Reese)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.misc
Subject: Re: Connection Machine
Message-ID: <13035@super.ORG>
Date: 16 Aug 89 15:34:52 GMT
References: <1957@leah.Albany.Edu>
Sender: news@super.ORG
Reply-To: cfreese@super.super.org (Craig F. Reese)
Organization: Supercomputing Research Center, Bowie, MD
Lines: 47
Summary: CM is real and there are lots of them...

In article <1957@leah.Albany.Edu> bv3456@leah.albany.edu (Victor @ The Concrete Museum) writes:
>
>
>In <476@mit-amt.MEDIA.MIT.EDU>, adam@mit-amt.MEDIA.MIT.EDU (Adam Glass) writes,
>>maddie@pnet01.cts.com (Tom Schenck) writes:
>>> I was looking through a few of my back issues of Scietific American, and I
>>> noticed an article on the Connection Machine... I was wondering if anyone on
>>> the net has heard anything of this machine? It was apparently designed and
>>> built in the mid-1980's, and I haven't heard much else on it.
>>
>>So far as I know, the Connection Machine is a massively parallel machine,
>>having 16384 (or thereabouts) processors (I think it would be deemed "fine
>>grain" by most people). It is made by Thinking Machines (Corporation?) here
>>in Cambridge, MA. Again, this is just a guess, but I believe that we here
>>at the Media Lab own the only one, though this doesn't sound likely.
>
>Off the top of my head:  I believe the CM was designed by Dan Hillis,
>who is the author of a book entitled, "The Connection Machine", published
>by the MIT Press.  I think the CM can acutally have up to 65536 processors (!),
>and must be connected to a front-end, usually a VAX or a Sun.  There is a C
>compiler for it (C*), which has some extensions (as well as limitations).
>
>			- victor

The CM is a commercial machine that is manufactured & sold by Thinking
Machines Inc. of Cambridge Mass.  It comes in various forms: 2K, 4K, 8K,
16K, 32K and 64K fine grained (single bit) processors.  As of the last
I heard there were about 35 installed at various government, commercial,
and achademic institutions.  The CM-2 (the current model) has a number
of enhanced features of the CM-1 (the one you probably read about).  Some
of these include.  The DataVault mass storage system.  The FrameBuffer
high speed/resolution graphics interface.  There is also a floating point
option that you can get (for big bucks!) which crams upto 2000 Weitek
chips into the 64K box.  In some cases this can really fly.

Within the last year or so there was a pretty good article in IEEE
computer describing the CM-2.  There was also an article in Comm. ACM
a while back that talked about some programming applications.

craig

-----------------
Craig F. Reese                           Email: cfreese@super.org
Institute for Defense Analyses/
Supercomputing Research Center 
17100 Science Dr.
Bowie, MD  20715-4300