A 32nm 1000-Processor Array

Re:A 32nm 1000-Processor Array by rwmj on Monday June 20, 2016 @04:25AM (#11936767)

This is "the" question. I suppose one could look at the Connection Machine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_Machine The CM-2a had 4K or 8K processors and was reputedly very difficult to program.

Looked great though: http://www.corestore.org/cm2a.htm

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Re:A 32nm 1000-Processor Array by sedachv on Monday June 20, 2016 @05:21PM (#11941678)

The Connection Machine was a SIMD design and the languages available for it (StarLisp: https://omohundro.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/omohundro86_th... and C*: http://people.csail.mit.edu/bradley/cm5docs/CStarProgramming...) were actually pretty good compared to OpenCL.

The Connection Machine Lisp programming language described in Daniel Hillis' PhD dissertation was essentially going to be Lisp with parallel map/reduce but AFAIK was never done being implemented.

I think the big problem was that most of the SIMD algorithms were yet to be discovered at the time. For example this paper by Hillis and Steele was a very big deal but looks kind of basic today: http://uenics.evansville.edu/~mr56/ece757/DataParallelAlgori...

Guy Blelloch did a lot of work on Connection Machines and basically wrote the book on SIMD programming: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~blelloch/papers/Ble90.pdf He also made a very nice programming language for parallel computing (NESL), as did Gary Sabot who worked at Connection Machines (Paralations). When you compare those to Hadoop or OpenCL it really is a wonder where we went wrong and what the designers of the latter were thinking (or not).

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Re:A 32nm 1000-Processor Array by panic on Monday June 20, 2016 @04:36AM (#11936809)

The CM-200 looks even cooler (at least in the brochure…): http://www.corestore.org/cm200.htm

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