Connection Machine
The Connection Machine was a series of parallel computers, which was produced from 1983 to 1991 by the American company Thinking Machines (German thinking machines ).
Formation
The concept of the Connection Machine is by Danny Hillis at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Together with Sheryl Handler, he founded the company in 1983 Thinking Machines, the development of the computer was by venture capital and the U.S. Department of Defense ( DARPA ) funded and supported later by the High Performance Computing and Communications Program ( HPCC ). In August of 1993, Thinking Machines to file for bankruptcy under Chapter 11.
Construction and variants
The first Connection Machine was a massively parallel system with up to 65,536 1-bit processors. Each processor could communicate directly with 20 other via a hypercube interconnection network. The processor nodes possessed its own main memory and worked initially after the SIMD principle.
The CM -1 ( 1983) was mainly designed to solve problems in the field of artificial intelligence. That's why Lisp was (also Star Lisp, a parallel extension of Common Lisp ) used to program *. With the CM -2 ( 1987) The Connection Machine was interesting for numerical methods, 32 per processor node shared a coprocessor ( Weitek 3132 ), the interface for this was a so-called SPRINT chip used, which, inter alia, had the ability to generate from the 32 1 -bit processor node has a 32- bit number. Together, the processor node generated an output to nine GFLOP (theoretically 20 GFLOP ). The CM -2a was a smaller version with a 4096 or 8192 processors, which was a further development of the CM- 2 CM -200. Moreover, it was with the introduction of the CM- 2, this * ( a parallel extension of C ) and CM Fortran also be programmed via C.
A change of computer architecture in the direction of MIMD in the year 1991 with the CM- fifth It consisted of a fat tree interconnection network of SPARC processors. In the CM- 5E, the SPARC -V7 processors were eventually replaced by Super Sparc processors.
During Connection Machines on frontend computer ( Symbolics, VAX and Sparc station later ) were used, was CM- 5, the first Connection Machine on which also has its own operating system, called CMost, ran, which was based on SunOS, but this was only to control processors used that provided which user logins and network services. On the individual processor elements a small microkernel operating system that was loaded at the start of a ROM and ready made basis functions for accepting and executing jobs ran.
Design
The Connection Machine also struck by her style. The case was a big block, usually cubical. , Groups of red LEDs were on the front; for each processor was a light-emitting diode. The flashing of the LED signaling the activity of each processor node. A CM -5 can be seen in the film Jurassic Park ( 1993).