Connection Machine

Home * Hardware * Connection Machine



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.

=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.

=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 : We began work on this program in May of 1994. Don Dailey and Larry Kaufman of Heuristic Software provided us with a version of Socrates, their serial chess program. During May and June we parallelized the program using Cilk, focusing mainly on the search algorithm and the transposition table. During June Dailey visited MIT to help tune the program, but we spent most of June simply getting the parallel version of the program to work correctly. In late June, we entered *Socrates in the 1994 ACM International Computer Chess Championship in Cape May, New Jersey. We ran the program on a 512-node CM-5 at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois. Despite the fact that we had begun working on the program less than two months earlier, the program ran reliable and finished in third place.

=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 Kuszmaul (1994). Synchronized MIMD Computing. Ph. D. thesis, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT, pdf
 * Chris Joerg, Bradley Kuszmaul (1994). Massively Parallel Chess. Third DIMACS Parallel Implementation Challenge, Rutgers University, pdf
 * Eric Brewer, Bradley Kuszmaul (1994). How to Get Good Performance from the CM-5 Data Network. IPPS 1994, 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 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= Up one Level