The Rise and Fall of Thinking Machines (1995)

Re:The Rise and Fall of Thinking Machines (1995) by dfox on Tuesday May 01, 2018 @02:27PM (#16969866)

One should note that CM-1/2 (which is essentially an FPGA turned inside out which you can reconfigure for every program step) has radically different architecture than CM-5 (which is essentially the same as modern many-CPU distributed memory supercomputers).

Also of note is that * Lisp described by Hillis' paper (xectors and xappings with more or less hidfen mapping to hardware) is completely different from * Lisp that was actually sold by TMC, which handled embedding of the problem geometry into hardware, but otherwise was Paris assembler (ie. what you send through the phenomenally thick cable from frontend to CM to make stuff happen) bolted onto Common Lisp. IIRC the commercial *Lisp got somehow opensourced and you can run it (in emulation mode) on top of SBCL.

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Re:The Rise and Fall of Thinking Machines (1995) by politips on Tuesday May 01, 2018 @05:34PM (#16971913)

You're right, he talks in the video I linked above about how different the CM-1/2 architecture is to the CM-5, but how the ideas of "data parallelism" on "virtual processors" maps onto both designs.

Thanks for the info, I have seen variants in old pdfs around that have the !! parallelism construct instead of using the algebraic forms of alpha, beta, and dot. I find the latter form as described in the book The Connection Machine to be very elegant.

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