Connection Machines – Prelude to Parallel Processing

The computer architecture entered into a new phase with the stored program concept and programmable and general purpose computing architecture. The credit for this development goes to John Von Neumann, Grace Hopper, and Howard Aiken. Later it was relatively easy to build microprocessors and computers like ENIAC, since the general computing architecture was well established.

However there was a problem with this primordial architecture. Unlike human intelligence, it was massively relying on a single powerful processor that operated on the stored program in a sequential order. The first computer to depart from this view and behave more similar to human brain was Connection Machine(CM).

In early eighties, Danny Hillis a graduate student in MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab designed a highly parallel supercomputer that incorporated 65,536 processors. This design was commercially manufactured by Thinking Machines Corporation(TMC) created by Danny Hillis under the name CM-1. Thousands of processors which formed a part of CM-1 were extremely simple one bit processor connected together in a complex 20-dimensional hypercube. The routing mechanism between several processors in CM-1 was designed by Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman himself. In 1985, CM-1 was a dream SIMD machine for labs working on artificial intelligence(AI). But it had some practical problems. First it was too expensive a machinery to be purchased by budding AI labs. Second it did not have a FORTRAN compiler, which was the famous programming language among scientists at that time. Third it did not have floating point processing mechanism, a must for scientific analysis. So CM-1, although was a parallel processing marvel, looked more immature to face the market. Realizing the mistakes done in the design of CM-1, Thinking Machine released CM-2 which had a floating point processor and FORTRAN compiler. But still it did not fly. Evidently Danny Hillis was making a machine for future that present had no use with.

In early nineties, Thinking Machine introduced CM-5, which featured in the control station of Steven Speilburg’s Jurassic Park. It is considered to be not only a technological marvel, but also a totally sexy supercomputer (see figure). Instead of simple processors, CM-5 had a cluster of powerful SPARC processors. They also came out of the hypercube concept and built their data network as a binary fat tree. CM-5 is a synchronized MIMD machine combined with some best aspects of SIMD. The system can support up to 16,384 SPARC processors. The processing nodes and data networks interacted through 1-micron standard cell CMOS network interfaces with clock synchronization. The raw bandwidth for each processing node was 40 MBPS. But in a fat tree as it goes up the level, the cumulative bandwidth may reach up to several GBPS (if all these remind you of Beowulf, you are not alone!). TMC guaranteed that CM-5 was completely free of fetch-deadlock problem that occurs between multiple processors (using this).

Although it looks like a great architecture, from pure technical standpoint it is evident that TMC has toned down its idea of a complete parallel machine, simply because in eighties it did not sell partly due to the lack of market readiness and partly due to some blows in design. Secondly the failure of earlier CM series took a toll on TMC’s strategy. When CM-5 was introduced, the future of the company was dependent on that supercomputer sale. Los Alamos National Laboratory bought one. Jurassic Park set bought one. I cannot think of any other major customer. If CM-5 had survived, it would have had to fight with the likes of Intel Paragon, and Beowulf cluster for market space.

After the cold war, DARPA has cut down its funding on high performance computing which fell as a final blow on Thinking Machines. One fine morning in 1994, TMC filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The Inc. gives an alternative explanation for the failure of Thinking Machine. It is a good insight, but I cannot buy in its opinion about Danny Hillis. Perhaps The Inc. should restrict itself to its primary aim of advising budding entrepreneurs and refrain from measuring scientific minds. Nobody can deny that Danny Hillis was a genius, but the problem was that he was an out of the world freak who could not become a good businessman. Currently he is working on an ambitious project to build a monumental, mechanical clock that would run for multi-millennium.

The way that Thinking Machine took, was certainly not the way to build a successful enterprise. But the initial architecture that they introduced in early eighties was truly a stroke of a genius that every computer architect must study and understand.