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