Talk:Connection Machine

message: I am pretty sure, the caption really should read "Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA" 67.180.29.122 07:17, 11 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Image Caption 

message: What happened to Hillis Handler and their company? Are they still in business? Dan100 12:36, Mar 12, 2005 (UTC)
: Danny Hillis went on to found Applied Minds, and I believe Sheryl Handler started a data-mining company called Ab Initio. Thinking Machines is not in business -- its software and hardware assets and patents were acquired by several companies. --Zippy 01:37, 31 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Where are they now?

message: Any benchmarks available?
: There certainly are - many CM-2 and CM-5 machines made it into the top 500 supercomputers list based I believe on benchmark performance. I'm pretty sure there were published LINPACK benchmarks, and likely others. --Zippy 19:57, 17 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  Erich and Jack started their Top-500 list after the last CM-5 was decommissioned.  The difficulty was attempting to determine a fair comparison with a minimum amount of work.  I seriously doubt a bit-serial version of LINPACK was ever written for any of the MPP architectures. 143.232.210.38 (talk) 23:43, 7 June 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Performance?

message: On the Thinking Machines page there is reference to notable contributers. Would such a reference be relavent here?
Something like Among the notable contributers were Stephen Wolfram and Richard Feynman.
:“Besides Danny Hillis, other noted people who worked for or with the company included David Waltz, Guy L Steele, Jr., Karl Sims, Brewster Kahle, Bradley Kuszmaul, Charles E. Leiserson, Marvin Minsky, Carl Feynman, Cliff Lasser, Alex Vasilevsky, Doug Lenat, Stephen Wolfram, Eric Lander, Richard Feynman, Mirza Mehdi, and Jack Schwartz.”
:: I just looked at Danny Hillis's book, the Connection Machine, and there are a number of people mentioned in the acknowledgements beyond the above list. --Zippy 20:18, 2 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Key Contributers?

message: The main article says that *Lisp was the major product (left) for Thinking Machines once it stopped making hardware. I'd like to know more about this. I would have guessed that its other, more popular languages (C* and *Fortran, I think) would have had more users and more requests for support. Is this not correct? What was the history of *Lisp as a product after the last CM-5 rolled off the line? --Zippy 20:17, 2 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: *Lisp major post-hardware product?

message: maybe it is correct to say that "*lisp" is pronounced "star lisp", but I think it's a weird way to put it. opinions? kzz* 18:22, 12 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: It strikes me as an entirely natural way to put it.--Prosfilaes 15:17, 18 July 2006 (UTC)

text: Sounds natural to me. Palpalpalpal 12:00, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

text: "starlisp" is the correct pronunciation. That's how it was said at Thinking Machines in 1994-5. Somewhere I have a *Lisp reference manual that I believe gives this as the official pronunciation. --Zippy 19:28, 17 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  pronouncing * "star" 

message: "The CM-5 ... had a large panel of red blinking LEDs." -- Was there any functional reason to put actual blinkenlights on this thing, or was it just a design statement? -- Writtenonsand (talk) 03:25, 28 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Lights 

message: "The CM-1 had a length, width, and height of 1.5 metres. It was divided into 8 equally large cubic sections." -- This sounds like they found a magical way to fit eight 1.5-meter cubes inside a 1.5-meter cube.  Hyperdimensional?  Or should this be rewritten as "8 equal-sized cubic sections"?
Sue D. Nymme (talk) 16:45, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Well spotted. I've rewritten this to be slightly less awkward. Letdorf (talk) 09:20, 14 May 2008 (UTC)
replies: text:  Nothing wrong with alluding to hyperdimensional constructs!  Feynman, did use some ideas of hyperdimensionality when designing the (CM-1/CM-2) interconnection, before the fat tree architecture was developed by Leiserson.  Feynman, well-versed in quantum mechanics, would get my vote for figuring out how to "hide" most of the computer in a wormhole. rhyre (talk) 18:51, 17 March 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Size 

message: Perhaps someone could contribute a paragraph on how the Connection Machine was utterly useless for any real problems that real customers needed solved? 24.6.157.14 (talk) 00:28, 29 May 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: First and foremost was that it was difficult to program on anything other than embarrassingly parallel test cases. Second, one site, LANL, could be argued that it ran one real problem (and was worth it); LANL brought two CMs.  This is why a site list starts to be useful. Then you need to learn the application ran on it.  That application might be classified (and still classified). Third, models didn't have instruction set compatibility. You must also understand that user application thinking typically ties up some important scientist.  This user cycle (think) time isn't taken lightly.  In part this is why CMs sited at PARC and UC Berkeley weren't used. Fourth, a lot of hype surrounded the machine, and only a minimum of science. A CM 2-D fluid flow around pipe cross-sections program was written at a time the Cray-2 was delivered and a "3-D pipes into the middle of a stream" simulation was written (insufficient memory on the CM-1 and embarrassing). Bad application timing; 3-D more interesting. Fifth, the first languages were versions of LISP and C.  They were late with a Fortran compiler (originally flaunted that only to come back tail between legs, very apologetic).  Sixth, hardware floating-point was only added later. Software floating point on the CM-1 was so slow (Danny didn't learn the lesson from the Goodyear MPP), you can tell a programmer's perspective by whether they counted CPUs or FPUs. 143.232.210.38 (talk) 00:01, 8 June 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Why it didn't sell. 

message: The last chapter or two were Hillis's ideas about how this architecture could help to reformulate computer science to look more like mathematical physics. Instead of writing code, we'd be writing equations like the wave equation or the diffusion equation, describing phenomena in space and time, and the processors would populate the area of interest like a finite-element model and run the calculation.
I don't know if it deserves mention in the article, but it was very poetic in its way. I wish I knew where I put that book, I'd like to read it again some day. -- WillWare (talk) 14:14, 2 December 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Last one or two chapters of Hillis's book 

message: Like an ordinary computer Intel i5 CPU.119.85.245.211 (talk) 23:50, 10 April 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  How fast is this computer when it compare to an ordinary computer today? 

message: I was curious about the note that Maya Lin did the external design, especially since there wasn't a citation in the article. Searching on Google I mostly see citations back to this Wikipedia article. I did find an A-to-Z book that mentions Maya Lin's contribution in passing, but I think a more authoritative reference would be useful. In case that one is a good place to start: 
http://books.google.com/books?id=pNmm_Axdor8C&pg=PA113&lpg=PA113&dq=%22maya+lin%22+%22connection+machine%22&source=bl&ots=xSnU8eXFfz&sig=olII6rQUrDO7wUR7RIN6jb23hZo&hl=en&sa=X&ei=PZrlUo_YM8HwoASstIGQCA&ved=0CDcQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=%22maya%20lin%22%20%22connection%20machine%22&f=false
Npdoty (talk) 23:35, 26 January 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Citation needed on Maya Lin 

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thread_title:  External links modified