The Connection Machine (Mit Press Series in Artificial Intelligence)
This book is essentially an edited version of Hillis's  landmark thesis describing the design and implementation of the  Connection Machine (CM), a massively parallel computer. The philosophy  behind the CM's design is that the right kind of machine for many  important computational tasks is a machine with vast numbers of simple  processors doing the same thing on different data. This notion of one  processor per important data element (one processor per pixel in image  processing) is inspiring.The Connection Machineis not a  textbook and may be intimidating to beginners, but it provides a  wonderful picture of the kinds of issues involved in designing a new  machine. The book is well written and features a host of interesting  discussions by Hillis on related topics (such as general philosophy of  parallel computing). Anyone interested in the subject of computer  architecture will enjoy and profit greatly from this book.