An Assessment of the Connection Machine (1990) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

An Assessment of the Connection Machine (1990) [pdf]

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23 pointsingve6 comments

I've been fascinated with this machine since it came out and one of my secret hopes with the advent of really cheap mobile processors and microcontrollers is that eventually someone will make one which is suitable for recreating some sort of modern Connection Machine analogue that's reasonably affordable.

Modern GPUs are in a very real sense the spiritual successors of the Connection Machine. So in some sense the "sort of analogue" has already arrived.

At one point there some deeply discounted Intel Phi PCIe boards on the grey market which I presume were either taken out of scale build-out during an upgrade or perhaps part of an abandoned project.

For a while I considered getting a few for a simulation hobby project I had at the time but the stars never really came into alignment for that.

I looked into that myself, but the number of cores didn't compare to that of GPUs - the cost was right, though. I don't know if those boards were better than a GPU or what? Maybe they were more optimized for compute than what a GPU is? I was kinda looking at them for playing more with ML (I've gotten tensorflow with CUDA working well on my 750 ti GPU and it wasn't bad - but the cost for something better beyond a 900 series was crazy at the time).

If you are ever in the Baltimore-Washington region, the National Cryptologic Museum has an example of a CM-5 on display.

As far as I know it is the only exhibit of a CM-5 available.

A CM-1 is on display at the Computer History Museum in California and a CM-2 is on display at MoMA in New York.

I have such fond memories of the CM-2. As a high school student during a summer science program I got to write genetic algorithms on it C*. I am always sad I became a Lisp fanboy decades later and missed the chance to hack in Star-Lisp the way that machine was meant to be handled.

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