
An Assessment of the Connection Machine (1990) [pdf] - ingve
http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/thinkingMachines/CM2/An_Assessment_of_the_Connection_Machine_Jun1990.pdf
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Quequau
I've been fascinated with this machine since it came out and one of my secret
hopes with the advent of really cheap mobile processors and microcontrollers
is that eventually someone will make one which is suitable for recreating some
sort of modern Connection Machine analogue that's reasonably affordable.

~~~
tntn
Modern GPUs are in a very real sense the spiritual successors of the
Connection Machine. So in some sense the "sort of analogue" has already
arrived.

~~~
Quequau
At one point there some deeply discounted Intel Phi PCIe boards on the grey
market which I presume were either taken out of scale build-out during an
upgrade or perhaps part of an abandoned project.

For a while I considered getting a few for a simulation hobby project I had at
the time but the stars never really came into alignment for that.

~~~
cr0sh
I looked into that myself, but the number of cores didn't compare to that of
GPUs - the cost was right, though. I don't know if those boards were better
than a GPU or what? Maybe they were more optimized for compute than what a GPU
is? I was kinda looking at them for playing more with ML (I've gotten
tensorflow with CUDA working well on my 750 ti GPU and it wasn't bad - but the
cost for something better beyond a 900 series was crazy at the time).

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jshaqaw
I have such fond memories of the CM-2. As a high school student during a
summer science program I got to write genetic algorithms on it C*. I am always
sad I became a Lisp fanboy decades later and missed the chance to hack in
Star-Lisp the way that machine was meant to be handled.

