
The Rise and Fall of Thinking Machines (1995) - rbanffy
https://www.inc.com/magazine/19950915/2622.html
======
politips
Yes this article is very old, and really only scratches the surface of Hillis'
genius and puts a business failure angle on it.

Here's a great video describing the architecture of the CM-5

[https://youtu.be/Ua-swPZTeX4](https://youtu.be/Ua-swPZTeX4)

Note how similar the programming concepts are to CUDA (at an abstract level).
Hillis also in the 80s published his MIT thesis as a book: The Connection
Machine

[https://www.amazon.com/Connection-Machine-Press-
Artificial-I...](https://www.amazon.com/Connection-Machine-Press-Artificial-
Intelligence/dp/0262081571/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1525195204&sr=8-1&keywords=the+connection+machine)

An incredibly well written and fascinating read, just as relevant today for
programming a GPU as it was for programming the ancient beast of a CM-2. It's
about algorithms, graphs, map/reduce, and other techniques of parallelism
pioneered at Thinking Machines.

For example, Guy Blelloch worked at TM, and pioneered prefix scans on these
machines, now common techniques used on GPUs.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5sM-4ODXaA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5sM-4ODXaA)

[http://uenics.evansville.edu/~mr56/ece757/DataParallelAlgori...](http://uenics.evansville.edu/~mr56/ece757/DataParallelAlgorithms.pdf)

There's also been a lot of hum lately on HN about APL, much of Hillis' *Lisp
ideas come from parallelizing array processing primitives ("zectors" and
"zappings"), ideas that originating in APL as he acknowledged in the paper
describing the language:

[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.108...](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.108.5413&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

What's old is new... again.

~~~
dfox
One should note that CM-1/2 (which is essentially an FPGA turned inside out
which you can reconfigure for every program step) has radically different
architecture than CM-5 (which is essentially the same as modern many-CPU
distributed memory supercomputers).

Also of note is that * Lisp described by Hillis' paper (xectors and xappings
with more or less hidfen mapping to hardware) is completely different from *
Lisp that was actually sold by TMC, which handled embedding of the problem
geometry into hardware, but otherwise was Paris assembler (ie. what you send
through the phenomenally thick cable from frontend to CM to make stuff happen)
bolted onto Common Lisp. IIRC the commercial *Lisp got somehow opensourced and
you can run it (in emulation mode) on top of SBCL.

~~~
politips
You're right, he talks in the video I linked above about how different the
CM-1/2 architecture is to the CM-5, but how the ideas of "data parallelism" on
"virtual processors" maps onto both designs.

Thanks for the info, I have seen variants in old pdfs around that have the !!
parallelism construct instead of using the algebraic forms of alpha, beta, and
dot. I find the latter form as described in the book The Connection Machine to
be very elegant.

------
msl
You might also like _Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine_ [1] written
in 1989 by Daniel Hillis.

[1] [http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-
machine...](http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machine/)

------
dang
Biggest previous discussion was in 2014. Some great comments in there:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7121058](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7121058)

Second biggest was in 2009, complete with "seriously, how many times does this
article has to be posted in HN?"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=743170](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=743170)

------
madengr
Real computers have blinken lights. In an age of dull beige boxes, that’s what
truly set them apart, at least to a layman.

I’m half joking, but half not. Nvidia, Cray, etc need to put some blinken
lights on these drab racks. Something with AI needs lights, and it looks sexy
to Joe Public.

Like in classic sci-fi, a sentient AI machine would have columns of blinken
lights, tended to by women with clipboards, lab coats, and high heels.

~~~
red75prime
I've watched blinken lights on my motherboard for about 2 seconds when it
performed automatic overclocking. POWER, CPU, DRAM, CPU, DRAM, CPU, DRAM, TPU,
BOOT. Quite entertaining.

~~~
dfox
I've seen some PC motherboards that contained integrated "POST card" in the
form of bunch of LEDs or pair of 7segment displays. Sadly this seems to got
replaced by few highlevel LEDs and bunch of meaningless ones, which includes
stuff like backlighted PCB.

By the way many DEC Alpha boards had large amount of LEDs near the CPU
(probably driven directly by the CPU) which shown state of PALcode (and thus
blinked in entertaining way even when the system is up and running)

------
godelmachine
I have a friend who works on Ab Initio software. Sheryl Handler is still the
company CEO. The made him sign strict NDA.

On an unrelated note, I bought "The Pattern on the Stone" by W. Daniel Hillis
last year. He gives a lot of examples on Tic Tac Toe

~~~
dsr_
I have one story to tell about Ab Initio.

They invited me in for an interview. At the end of the day, they weren't done.
So we did another day of interviews. And another.

They interviewed me, phone and in-person, for over 20 hours.

Then we got to discussing what sort of compensation I would require... and
then they decided that they didn't want to hire me.

I have a friend there who is pretty happy, but they can't tell me what they do
except in the broadest terms.

------
patrickg_zill
It's interesting to see how some of what Connection Machines thought would
happen in the future, has now come to pass, such as scientists renting
computing capacity by the hour, with e.g. GPU rental on cloud computing.

~~~
erikj
Wasn't it how everything worked back in the early mainframes and timesharing
days?

~~~
monocasa
And has always worked with compute clusters too.

------
jacquesm
What with all the people drooling over the LEDS, how about a PCI board that
shows the top bits of the address bus?

~~~
fulafel
You can't see the cpu address bus from a pci(e) card sadly.

~~~
jacquesm
Ah yes, of course, it's more like a bunch of serial links. Ok, how about a
vacant RAM slot then?

~~~
rbanffy
Well... Each board had 32 LEDs (the top 16 were doubled, I don't know for
what), each cube had 16 boards, 8 on one side, a couple in the middle without
LEDs and doing communications, IIRC, and 8 more on the other side. Not sure it
had LEDs on the back cubes.

I'm seriously thinking about building a cluster of ARM-based thingies and use
LEDs controlled from each node to show usage of cores, NEON lanes (patching
the Ne10 library) and so on. There are some octa-core big.LITTLE (I forget the
new name) boards that would make the carrier boards simpler (only 4 per
carrier needed, considering CPUs alone). The boards themselves would be
simple, having only LEDs connected to the GPIO pins and power being fed to the
nodes, which would be wired together using ethernet.

Another, way cooler but waaaaay dumber (because it'd be a shitload of work for
me), would be to design a board around an ethernet switch and a bunch of
Octavo SiPs (or, maybe, some Pi-like CPU Soc with PoP RAM on top, provided it
has ethernet on board to reduce chip count). Having everything on a single
board would avoid PHY transceivers and reduce board complexity, but it still
would be a ton of work for someone who hasn't designed a PCB since the dawn of
the SMD era. Also, the Octavo parts are single core and we'd need 32 of them
per board to light up 32 LEDs in a meaningful way. I'd rather restart my
hardware engineer career with something less megalomaniac.

The final, laziest, approach would be to get a cluster board and 7 SOPINE
modules from the fine people at Pine64 and wire their GPIO lines to a couple
LED matrix modules. With 28 cores per board, the use of 28 of the 32 lights
would be simple to figure out, but we'd need something for the other 4 LEDs (2
could be from the on-board ethernet upstream port, but 2 still remain. Also,
since the SOPINES stand perpendicular to the cluster board, spacing would be
very tight.

~~~
jacquesm
That'd be one very impressive lightshow :)

~~~
voxadam
Replace the LEDs with laser diodes if you want something _truly_ impressive.

~~~
rbanffy
I don't want to get killed while running benchmarks.

------
Nokinside
This was the company where Richard Feynman's job was to paint walls and buy
office supplies.

~~~
madengr
He did more than that, but painting a wall, or other manual labor that doesn't
require concentration, gives time for deep thinking. I'm sure he didn't mind
it.

~~~
rrmm
Hillis gives a written account of it. He wanted to do stuff that actually
needed to get done; not BS.

[http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-
machine...](http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machine/)

""" We were arguing about what the name of the company should be when Richard
walked in, saluted, and said, "Richard Feynman reporting for duty. OK, boss,
what's my assignment?" The assembled group of not-quite-graduated MIT students
was astounded.

After a hurried private discussion ("I don't know, you hired him..."), we
informed Richard that his assignment would be to advise on the application of
parallel processing to scientific problems.

"That sounds like a bunch of baloney," he said. "Give me something real to
do."

So we sent him out to buy some office supplies. While he was gone, we decided
that the part of the machine that we were most worried about was the router
that delivered messages from one processor to another. We were not sure that
our design was going to work. When Richard returned from buying pencils, we
gave him the assignment of analyzing the router. """

------
ironchief
Great writing by Gary A. Taubes who is now better known for writing about
carbohydrates and sugar through books like "Good Calories, Bad Calories"

~~~
godelmachine
How is "Good Calories, Bad Calories" as a book? What does it talk about?

~~~
eigenspace
Haven't read his book but I've listened to him talk on podcasts. I think he
makes some excellent criticisms on the horrible state of dietary science. He
can be a bit digmatic himself and sometimes makes unhelpful statements but he
also has some great points. I'd probably credit him with the chain of events
that resulted in me deciding to go low carb which has turned out to be a great
decision so far for me.

------
gatsby
Reading this on mobile I got really confused: this was published in 1995.

~~~
rbanffy
Yes. In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, and
supercomputers looked super. ;-)

note: I fixed the headline.

------
johan_larson
Cool and awesome does not pay. The top companies may be using cool stuff to
accomplish things, but the things being done are ultimately pedestrian. Google
sells ads, Amazon runs an online marketplace, Apple makes personal
communicators and Facebook is a place for chatting with friends. None of them
are doing anything like "searching for the origins of the universe."

~~~
jacquesm
Cool and awesome pays just fine. Ask NVIDIA. Many of the ideas pioneered in
the Connection Machine have been validated by time. Hillis was only a couple
of decades or so ahead of his time.

~~~
infinite8s
It doesn't pay when it is ahead of its time :)

