Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!ukma!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!csd4.csd.uwm.edu!leah!bv3456 From: bv3456@leah.albany.edu (Victor @ The Concrete Museum) Newsgroups: comp.sys.misc Subject: Re: Connection Machine Message-ID: <1957@leah.Albany.Edu> Date: 14 Aug 89 18:45:39 GMT Sender: bv3456@leah.Albany.Edu Lines: 22 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