Connection Machine

Danny Hillis (b. 1956)

Processing more data faster is one of the fundamental challenges in computing.
From the 1940s until the 1990s, most improvements came from faster
components, clock cycles, and storage systems. But another approach to
processing more data faster is to break up the problem into many smaller
problems and process in parallel, with a fleet of machines.
Parallelization is possible because many computing problems are similar to
knitting sweaters. If you needed four sweaters in a month, you could hire the
world’s fastest knitter to churn them out, knitting one each week. Or you could
hire 12 fast knitters to work simultaneously on the sleeves and the bodies and
then join them all together on Friday. And if you needed 10,000 sweaters? In
that case, you could hire 50,000 knitters of average skill: they don’t have to be
fast, and it doesn’t really matter if some of them fail, provided there is a clever
approach for properly organizing the effort.
This is the kind of parallelism behind Thinking Machines. Based on a PhD
thesis by its cofounder Danny Hillis at MIT, the company’s first supercomputer
combined 65,536 puny 1-bit microprocessors, each “connected” through a
massively parallel network.
Called the CM-1, it proved difficult to program, because few programmers
could visualize algorithms that run efficiently on massively connected 1-bit
processors. In 1991, the company released the CM-5, which used 1,024
standard 32-bit microprocessors. Programming was easier, and with so many
processors, the CM-5 was one of the fastest computers in existence.
Although the idea of combining thousands of computers together in a single
machine worked well in the 1990s, a decade later the dominant approach for
solving big problems was grid computing—connecting thousands (or millions)
of conventional computer systems over Ethernet with specialized software.
Using conventional systems that were not very fast and subject to failure was
the electronic equivalent of hiring “average knitters” in the sweater example.
Instead of designing complicated parallelizing hardware, like the CM series, the
challenge shifted to designing clever software.
SEE ALSO Hadoop Makes Big Data Possible (2006)
Removing a panel of the CM-2, exposing one of the “subcubes” containing 16
printed circuit boards, each containing 32 central processing chips, each chip
containing 16 processors, for a total of 8,192 processors in the sub-cube, or
65,536 processors in total.