Thinking Machines CM-2 at the Computing Museum in San Jose. One of the face plates has been partially removed to show the circuit boards inside.

The Connection Machine was a series of supercomputers that grew out of Danny Hillis's research in the early 1980s at MIT on alternatives to the traditional von Neumann architecture of computation. The CM-1, originally conceived of at MIT, was a "massively parallel" hypercube arrangement of thousands of very simple processors, each with its own RAM, which together executed in a SIMD fashion. The Connection Machine was originally intended for applications in artificial intelligence and symbolic processing, but later found greater success in the field of computational science. ImageMetadata File history File links Download high resolution version (2048x1536, 1213 KB) Thinking Machines CM2 at the Computing Museum in San Jose Description: Thinking Machines CM2 at the Computing Museum in San Jose. ... ImageMetadata File history File links Download high resolution version (2048x1536, 1213 KB) Thinking Machines CM2 at the Computing Museum in San Jose Description: Thinking Machines CM2 at the Computing Museum in San Jose. ... A supercomputer is a computer that leads the world in terms of processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation, at the time of its introduction. ... This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ... The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, is a university located in the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. MIT is one of the worlds leading research institutions in science and technology. ... The term von Neumann architecture refers to a computer design model that uses a single storage structure to hold both instructions and data. ... In geometry, the tesseract, or hypercube, is a regular, convex polychoron with eight cubical cells. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... -1... Hondas intelligent humanoid robot Artificial intelligence (AI) is defined as intelligence exhibited by an artificial entity. ... Computational Science is the use of computers to perform research in other fields. ...

Hillis and Sheryl Handler founded Thinking Machines in Waltham, Massachusetts (it was later moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts) in 1983 and assembled a team to develop the CM-1 and then the CM-2, which, depending on the configuration, had as many as 65,536 processors. The individual processors were extremely simple, processing one bit at a time. The CM-2, launched in 1987, added Weitek 3132 floating-point numeric co-processors to the system, with 32 of the original simple processors sharing each numeric processor. Two later variants of the CM-2 were also produced, the smaller CM-2a with either 4096 or 8192 single-bit processors, and the faster CM-200. Thinking Machines Corporation was a supercomputer manufacturer founded in Waltham, Massachusetts in 1982 by W. Daniel Hillis and Sheryl Handler to turn Hilliss doctoral work at MIT on massively parallel computing architectures into a commercial product called the Connection Machine. ... Waltham on the banks of the Charles river Often called the true birthplace of the industrial revolution, Waltham is a city located in Middlesex County, Massachusetts. ... Nickname: City of Squares Official website: www. ... Weitek Corporation was a former chip-design company that originally concentrated on floating point units for a number of commercial CPU designs. ... A floating-point number is a digital representation for a number in a certain subset of the rational numbers, and is often used to approximate an arbitrary real number on a computer. ... A coprocessor is a computer processor used to supplement the functions of the primary processor (the CPU). ...

The light panels of FROSTBURG, a CM-5, on display at the National Cryptologic Museum. The panels were used to check the usage of the processing nodes, and to run diagnostics.

Due to its origins in AI research, the CM-1/CM-2 single-bit processor was influenced by the Lisp programming language and a version of Common Lisp, *Lisp (pronounced "Star-Lisp"), was the first language to be implemented on the CM-1. Much system utility software for the CM-1/2 was written in *Lisp. Later, *Lisp would become the central product of the company after it stopped making computer hardware. Image File history File linksMetadata Download high resolution version (1640x2500, 634 KB) Summary w:FROSTBURG on display at the National Cryptologic Museum in 2005. ... Image File history File linksMetadata Download high resolution version (1640x2500, 634 KB) Summary w:FROSTBURG on display at the National Cryptologic Museum in 2005. ... FROSTBURG on display at the National Cryptologic Museum. ... The United States National Cryptologic Museum is museum of cryptography history, affiliated with the National Security Agency (NSA). ... Lisp is a family of computer programming languages with a long history and a distinctive fully-parenthesized syntax. ... Common Lisp, commonly abbreviated CL, is a dialect of the Lisp programming language, standardised by ANSI X3. ... See Star Lisp ... See Star Lisp ... See Star Lisp ...

With the CM-5, announced in 1991, Thinking Machines switched from the CM-2's hypercube architecture of simple processors to an entirely new MIMD architecture based on a fat tree network of SPARC RISC processors. The later CM-5E replaced the SPARC processors with faster SuperSPARCs. Multiple Instruction Multiple Data (MIMD) is a type of parallel computing architecture where many functional units perform different operations on different data. ... The Fat-Tree network, invented by Charles Leiserson of MIT, is a universal network for provably efficient communication. ... Sun UltraSPARC II Microprocessor Sun UltraSPARC T1 (Niagara 8 Core) SPARC (Scalable Processor ARChitecture) is a pure big-endian RISC microprocessor architecture originally designed in 1985 by Sun Microsystems. ... Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC), is a microprocessor CPU design philosophy that favors a smaller and simpler set of instructions that all take about the same amount of time to execute. ...

Connection Machines were noted for their (intentional) striking visual design. The CM-2 was cube-shaped with red blinking LEDs visible over a large portion of the surface. The CM-5, when viewed from above, looked like a lightning bolt, and also had a large panel of red blinking LEDs. Perhaps because of its design, a CM-5 was featured in the movie Jurassic Park in the control room for the island. External links LEd Category: TeX ... This article is about the 1993 hit movie. ...

Danny Hillis's original thesis paper, on which the Connection Machine was based, is The Connection Machine (MIT Press Series in Artificial Intelligence) (ISBN 0262081571) . The title is out of print as of 2005. The book provides an overview of the philosophy, architecture and software for the Connection Machine, including data routing between CPU nodes, memory handling, Lisp programming for parallel machines, etc. This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ... Lisp is a family of computer programming languages with a long history and a distinctive fully-parenthesized syntax. ...

See also

• Transputer
• FROSTBURG — a CM-5 used by the NSA

The INMOS Transputer was a pioneering parallel computing microprocessor design of the 1980s from INMOS, a small English company. ... FROSTBURG on display at the National Cryptologic Museum. ... NSA can stand for: National Security Agency of the USA The British Librarys National Sound Archive This page concerning a three-letter acronym or abbreviation is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ...

References

• Arthur Trew and Greg Wilson (eds.) (1991). Past, Present, Parallel: A Survey of Available Parallel Computing Systems. New York: Springer-Verlag. ISBN 0-387-19664-1.

External links

• Gallery of CM-5 images
• CM-5 Manuals