The Design of the Connection Machine (1994)

by boulos • 5 years ago

99 38 5 years ago

yholio• 5 years ago

The final black hypercube design looks modern even for contemporary standards.

qubex• 5 years ago

And it probably always will, because it’s so stark and devoid of period references that it’ll never look more or less in context. That’s the point, I think.

voldacar2• 5 years ago

This thing has so much soul. Its physical design is intentional; its form reflects its structure and function.

Supercomputers now are just big racks with maybe a cool graphic printed on the side, which makes me kind of sad.

bouvin• 5 years ago

Agreed. Seems The Connection Machine was the last gorgeous supercomputer.

timmg3• 5 years ago

Anyone know how many CM-1s and CM-2s were made? I spent a few minutes googling and got nothing. Did they sell 10s of them or 100s of them or more?

convolvatron5• 5 years ago

from my very hazy memory, there were only a few CM-1s made. maybe 10 in total outside TMC?

CM-2s showed up at most supercomputer centers in the US, and even some universities. I think Yale(?) had an 8k. there were several at black sites - at least another 8 machines I guess.

so at least tens, but I don't think 100s

timmg3• 5 years ago

Ok, thanks.

It occured to me how cool it would be to pick one up on eBay. Obviously, I didn't find one. (Not that would have actually bought one.) I guess this is why :)

chr15p• 5 years ago

top500.org for June 1994 lists 79 entries for Thinking Machines which is their high water mark, but it looks like most of those are CM-5s with about 20 being CM-2.

So assuming some of the CM-5s are replacements for CM-1 and 2s I would expect they sold maybe 100 machines total, 150 absolute max across all three models.

steppi• 5 years ago

William Daniel Hillis's dissertation about the Connection Machine is available online [1] and is a fascinating read. It generated some interesting past discussion here [2]. I started reading through the dissertation earlier this year with a hope of gathering enough information to reverse engineer Feynman's partial differential equation based method to calculate the number of buffer's needed per chip. I had to drop that project for lack of time but came away really impressed with the considerations that went into the design of the CM.

[1] https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/14719/1852428...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12281637

ssivark• 5 years ago

I’ve always been curious about both the CM and Feynman’s PDE based approach, but never found any clear writing on the topic. If anyone is digging into this, I’m happy to assist in any way I can (I have a theoretical physics background, fwiw). Feel free to hit me up (email in profile).

mark_l_watson• 5 years ago

I was fortunate enough to have been paid to write some Star Lisp code for the CM-1 that was provided to my company via DARPA.

We also received a Butterfly Machine but I never used it.

darkstarsys• 5 years ago

I loved working at TMC. Amazing collection of some of the smartest and most interesting people.

dmd• 5 years ago

Did/do you work at Ab Initio too, or just TM?

voldacar2• 5 years ago

got any cool stories?

kortex• 5 years ago

Perhaps we need to do exactly the opposite, and look at the so-called primitive or pre-industrial cultures to find out how they use ornament to increase the significance and worth of the objects they produce.

I think that ornamentation and aesthetics are often overlooked or minimized in the pursuit of optimization, typically cost reduction. But this article and this line in particular elucidates why we stand to benefit from keeping aesthetics in mind.

tda2• 5 years ago

I just saw a nice keynote by David Beazley on how he installed python on a CM5 at Los Alamos, very entertaining

Banana6992• 5 years ago

What OS was it running? or did he compile Cpython from source?

convolvatron5• 5 years ago

CM5 used solaris front ends, back ends didn't have an OS.

tda2• 5 years ago

This is the talk: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4RSht_aV7AU, it is a full hour. Quite enjoyable but light on in depth technical stuff. Don't recall hem mentioning how git python running technically, it is more about how he came in the position to do so in the first place.

timmg3• 5 years ago

Someone should make a mini CM-2 -- desktop size. With the LEDs and everything. And then some kind of emulator (or FPGA) on the inside that could actually run their code. Maybe connect to a desktop via USB or something.

I wonder if the compiler/whatever for the host machine is available anywhere?

mepian• 5 years ago

There is the *Lisp (StarLisp) simulator at least: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/ai-repository/ai/lang/l...

This seems to be a GitHub mirror: https://github.com/LdBeth/star-lisp

torgoguys• 5 years ago

I have made a ~10% model of one with lights and all.

The innards do not run CM software though. But I'd did try to stay true to the overall spirit of the design. I have a bunch of Intel Edison boards slotted into the cubes that can slide in and out to add processing capacity for my model setup. I copied the overall gist of the original cooling solution too.

I agree that there should be kits for this sort of thing. The machine looks so cool.

convolvatron5• 5 years ago

if anyone is interested..I'm sure there are other people more qualified, but I did spend quite a bit of time working with Paris and the underlying microcode system CMIS. it really wouldn't be that huge of a project to undertake. (@gmail.com)

one FPGA cell looks a lot like a CM processor, but since it gets reprogrammed every cycle, idk that that direct mapping works. but something would.

an interesting question though is the point. CM software wasn't anything like 'normal' software...so it took some subs tantial work to port codes.

would anyone really use such a thing or it is just a curiosity?

a _really_ cool project would be implementing CM-LISP

edit: everything except the router that is. that would be a bit of trouble

bosquefrio• 5 years ago

@convolvatron Why do you say that implementing CM-LISP would be a really cool project?

SavantIdiot2• 5 years ago

I worked as a CPU architect at Intel for a decade. Never once did anyone solve an architecture problem the way Feynman did on CM-1. From wikipedia:

"The engineers had originally calculated that seven buffers per chip would be needed, but this made the chip slightly too large to build. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman had previously calculated that five buffers would be enough, using a differential equation involving the average number of 1 bits in an address."

He determined the buffer size using a differential equation? Modern engineers would run trillions of simulation cycles of an RTL model and sweep the buffer size for thousands of workloads to find the inflection point, and present an Excel chart in a meeting. Then the design engineers would determine if there was enough die area to implement the buffer size, and even if there wasn't area but the performance was significant, they would have to implement it.

Engineering now vs engineering then.

Banana6992• 5 years ago

Engineering now vs engineering then.

Your post was great up until this. I don't like the 'Things were great in the past but look at us now' tone in general (doesn't mean it's not true in some cases), but also that's not what the historical incident shows : the "engineers then" were just as flabbergasted at Feynman's approach as anybody, and didn't trust the results.

Feynman was a physicist, not an engineer. Differentials and integrals were his breakfast and dinner for ~50 years at the time. You and his colleagues at the CM team saw Outsider's Effect in action: where a talented individual, with a mind fresh of dogmas and established approaches, manage to repurpose the tools they practiced and honed in a different domain to engage and destroy a target in another domain from a highly unusual angle. Like startups, it doesn't always work. But when it works, it's fantastic.

SavantIdiot2• 5 years ago

You read way too much into that.

I never said A was better than B, you just assumed and then got on your soap box to lecture me.

Also, I don't care what you like or if you think my post is great.

bsder2• 5 years ago

As much as I admire him, Feynman was also no stranger to "Proof By Intimidation." So, skepticism about his claims was always warranted if you couldn't follow them yourself.

This is the difference between engineering and academia--abandoning an incorrect claim or assumption may carry a cost. If you are engineering something, someone might might actually hold you to your claims and start allocating money and resources. So, your claims had better be accurate.

This is part of where the famous intransigence of engineers comes from. "Yes" and "No" are difficult answers. The world is full of "Maybe". Having the intuition from experience to pull the trigger even when the answer is "Maybe" is what makes you a high-level engineer.

peter303• 5 years ago

The mid-1980s to mid-1990s was the golden age of computer architecture experimentation. Computer aided circuit design meant a relatively small group of engineers could design and fabricate a new CPU design.

The competition from rapidly evolving commodity CPUs ended this era. It took 3-5 years to make a new generation special purpose CPU and financially justify manufacture. By that time the commodity CPU price-performance increased an order of magnitude and caught up. Few of these designs ever produced a second generation. And I think only Convex made it to gen-3 before folding.

The Design of the Connection Machine (1994)

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