Connection+Machine

a series of supercomputers that grew out of Danny Hillis' doctoral research at MIT in the early 1980s on alternatives to the traditional von Neumann architecture of computation, originally intended for applications in artificial intelligence and [|symbolic computation]. The Connection Machine was manufacturered since 1983 by [|Thinking Machines Corporation] (TMC), founded by Danny Hillis and [|Sheryl Handler]. || toc =CM-1, CM-2, CM-200= The **CM-1** consisted of up to 64 kibi of 1-bit [|SIMD] processors with 4 kibibits of RAM each inside a network of a 12-dimensional boolean [|n-cube] structure suggested by physicist Richard Feynman. Within this hardwired physical structure, the software data structures for communication and transfer of data between processors could change as needed depending on the nature of the problem. This meant the mutability of the connections between processors were more important than the processors themselves. The **CM-2**, released in 1987, was a more advanced successor (including floating point hardware) with the same physical structure.  =CM-5= Under guidance of Charles E. Leiserson and Bradley C. Kuszmaul, the **CM-5**, announced in 1991, switched from the CM-2's hypercubic architecture of simple processors to an entirely new [|MIMD] architecture based on the [|fat tree] network of SPARC, and for the later CM-5E, SuperSPARC processors.
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 * [[image:CM5_lg.jpg width="320" link="http://people.csail.mit.edu/bradley/cm5/"]] ||~ || **Connection Machine**,
 * Mockup of a 512-processor CM-5 ||~ ||^ ||

=Chess= Lewis Stiller used a CM-2 to generate certain chess six-piece endgame tablebases by massively parallel retrograde analysis. CM-5 architects Charles E. Leiserson and Bradley C. Kuszmaul were also co-authors of the parallel MIT chess programs StarTech and *Socrates. StarTech played the ACM 1993 on NCSA's 512-processor CM-5 for third place. Incorporating the ACM 1993 winner, the serial program Socrates II by Don Dailey and Larry Kaufman, StarTech emerged to *Socrates, which played the ACM 1994 on the CM-5/512 again to become third behind Deep Thought II and Zarkov. At the WCCC 1995 in [|Hong Kong], *Socrates played on a Intel Paragon, where it lost the playoff versus Fritz.

=Quotes= Quote from //History of *Socrates// by Chris Joerg from his Ph.D. Thesis :

=Chess Programs=
 * StarTech
 * *Socrates

=See also=
 * nCUBE
 * Paragon

=Selected Publications=

1985 ...

 * W. Daniel Hillis (**1985**). //The Connection Machine//. Ph. D. thesis, MIT, advisors Gerald Jay Sussman, Claude Shannon, and Marvin Minsky, [|pdf]
 * W. Daniel Hillis (**1986**). //The Connection Machine//. [|MIT Press], ISBN 0262081571, [|Amazon]
 * [|Lewis W. Tucker], [|George G. Robertson] (**1988**). //Architecture and Applications of the Connection Machine//. Computer, Vol. 21, No. 8
 * [|S. Lennart Johnsson], [|Robert L. Krawitz], Roger Frye, [|Douglas MacDonald] (**1989**). //A Radix-2 FFT on the Connection Machine//. [|Supercomputing 89], [|pdf]
 * [|S. Lennart Johnsson], [|Robert L. Krawitz], Roger Frye, [|Douglas MacDonald] (**1989**). //Cooley-Tukey FFT on the Connection Machine//. [|Parallel Computing], [|pdf]

1990 ...

 * Erol Gelenbe (**1990**). //[|Performance Analysis of the Connection Machine]//. ACM SIGMETRICS, [|pdf]
 * [|Arthur Trew], Greg Wilson (eds.) (**1991**). //[|Past, Present, Parallel: A Survey of Available Parallel Computing Systems]//. [|Springer]
 * Mark Bromley, [|Steven Heller], [|Tim McNerney], Guy L. Steele Jr. (**1991**). //[|Fortran at ten gigaflops: the connection machine convolution compiler]//. [|PLDI '91]
 * [|Jacek Myczkowski], Guy L. Steele Jr. (**1991**). //[|Seismic modeling at 14 gigaflops on the connection machine]//. [|Supercomputing '91]
 * Charles E. Leiserson, [|Zahi S. Abuhamdeh], David C. Douglas, Carl R. Feynman, Mahesh N. Ganmukhi, Jeffrey V. Hill, W. Daniel Hillis, Bradley C. Kuszmaul, Margaret A. St. Pierre, David S. Wells, Monica C. Wong, Shaw-Wen Yang, Robert Zak (**1992**). //The Network Architecture of the Connection Machine CM-5//. 4th ACM Symposium on Parallel Algorithms and Architectures, (**1996**). //revised version//. [|Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing], Vol. 33, No. 2
 * W. Daniel Hillis, [|Lewis W. Tucker] (**1993**). //The CM-5 Connection Machine: A Scalable Supercomputer//. Communications of the ACM, Vol. 36, No. 11
 * Burton Wendroff, Tony Warnock, Lewis Stiller, Dean Mayer, Ralph Brickner (**1993**). //Bits and pieces: constructing chess endgame databases on parallel and vector architectures//. Applied Numerical Mathematics, Vol. 12, Nos. 1-3
 * [|Lyle N. Long], [|Jacek Myczkowski] (**1993**). //[|Solving the Boltzmann Equation at 61 gigaflops on a 1024-Node CM-5]//. [|pdf]
 * [|Tamiko Thiel] (**1994**). //[|The Design of the Connection Machine]//. [|DesignIssues], Vol. 10, No. 1, [|MIT Press]
 * Bradley C. Kuszmaul (**1994**). //Synchronized MIMD Computing//. Ph. D. thesis, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT, [|pdf]
 * Chris Joerg, Bradley C. Kuszmaul (**1994**). //Massively Parallel Chess//. Third DIMACS Parallel Implementation Challenge, [|Rutgers University], [|pdf]
 * Michael Halbherr, Yuli Zhou, Chris Joerg (**1994**). //[|MIMD-Style Parallel Programming with Continuation-Passing Threads]//. Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Massive Parallelism: Hardware, Software, and Applications

1995 ...

 * Bradley C. Kuszmaul (**1995**). //The StarTech Massively Parallel Chess Program//. ICCA Journal, Vol. 18, No. 1, [|pdf]
 * Robert Blumofe, Chris Joerg, Bradley Kuszmaul, Charles Leiserson, Keith H. Randall, Yuli Zhou (**1995**). //Cilk: An Efficient Multithreaded Runtime System//. Proceedings of the Fifth ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming (PPoPP) Santa Barbara, California Pg. 207–216, [|pdf]
 * Lewis Stiller (**1995**). //Exploiting symmetry on parallel architectures//. Ph.D. thesis
 * Chris Joerg (**1996**). //The Cilk System for Parallel Multithreaded Computing// Ph. D. thesis, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT, [|pdf]
 * Lewis Stiller (**1996**). //Multilinear Algebra and Chess Endgames//. [|Games of No Chance] edited by Richard J. Nowakowski, [|pdf]

=External Links=
 * [|Connection Machine from Wikipedia]
 * [|Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine] - [|The Long Now]
 * [|The Connection Machine - CHM Revolution] from The Computer History Museum
 * [|The Connection Machine] by [|Tamiko Thiel]
 * [|Corestore collection: Connection Machine CM-200]
 * [|Gallery of Connection Machine CM-5 Images] hosted by Bradley C. Kuszmaul
 * [|CM-5 Manuals] hosted by Bradley C. Kuszmaul
 * [|CM-5/512 | TOP500 Supercomputer Sites]
 * [|CM-5/1024 | TOP500 Supercomputer Sites]

=References= =What links here?= include page="Connection Machine" component="backlinks" limit="40"
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