[HN Gopher] The Design of the Connection Machine (1994)
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The Design of the Connection Machine (1994)
Author : boulos
Score : 87 points
Date : 2021-11-12 17:13 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (tamikothiel.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (tamikothiel.com)
| yholio wrote:
| The final black hypercube design looks modern even for
| contemporary standards.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| 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.
| Banana699 wrote:
| >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.
| voldacar wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Agreed. Seems The Connection Machine was the last gorgeous
| supercomputer.
| timmg wrote:
| 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?
| chr15p wrote:
| 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.
| convolvatron wrote:
| 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
| timmg wrote:
| 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 :)
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| haha - first thing I did when I saw the hypercube/nuerons
| tshirt was check ebay - no dice!
| fao_ wrote:
| In the article it's referred to as the "CM-1 tshirt
| design" so I plugged the first two words into duckduckgo
| and the first result led me to someone who is selling the
| tshirts:
|
| http://www.tamikothiel.com/cm/cm-tshirt.html
| nickdothutton wrote:
| I have one and the printing and material quality were
| very good.
| monocasa wrote:
| Which is actually the same site as the article. It's
| Tamiko Thiel's personal site.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| hey thanks! goes to show i need to step out of my ebay
| bubble from time to time
| kortex wrote:
| > 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.
| tda wrote:
| I just saw a nice keynote by David Beazley on how he installed
| python on a CM5 at Los Alamos, very entertaining
| Banana699 wrote:
| What OS was it running? or did he compile Cpython from source?
| steppi wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| timmg wrote:
| 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?
| torgoguys wrote:
| 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.
| mepian wrote:
| 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
| peter303 wrote:
| 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.
| darkstarsys wrote:
| I loved working at TMC. Amazing collection of some of the
| smartest and most interesting people.
| voldacar wrote:
| got any cool stories?
| dmd wrote:
| Did/do you work at Ab Initio too, or just TM?
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