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The Connection Machine was a series of Supercomputer s that grew out of Danny Hillis 's research in the early 1980s at MIT on alternatives to the traditional Von Neumann Architecture of computation. The '''CM-1''', originally conceived of at MIT, was a "massively parallel" Hypercubic arrangement of thousands of very simple Microprocessors or CPUs , each with its own RAM , which together executed in a SIMD fashion. The Connection Machine was originally intended for applications in Artificial Intelligence and symbolic processing, but later found greater success in the field of Computational Science . Danny Hillis and Sheryl Handler founded Thinking Machines in Waltham, Massachusetts (it was later moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts ) in 1983 and assembled a team to develop the CM-1 and then the CM-2, which, depending on the configuration, had as many as 65,536 processors. The individual processors were extremely simple, processing one bit at a time. The CM-2, launched in 1987, added Weitek 3132 Floating-point Numeric Co-processors to the system, with 32 of the original simple processors sharing each numeric processor. Two later variants of the CM-2 were also produced, the smaller '''CM-2a''' with either 4096 or 8192 single-bit processors, and the faster '''CM-200'''. , a CM-5, on display at the National Cryptologic Museum . The panels were used to check the usage of the processing nodes, and to run diagnostics.]] Due to its origins in AI research, the software for the CM-1/CM-2 single-bit processor was influenced by the . With the CM-5, announced in 1991, Thinking Machines switched from the CM-2's hypercubic architecture of simple processors to an entirely new MIMD architecture based on a Fat Tree network of SPARC RISC processors. The later '''CM-5E''' replaced the SPARC processors with faster SuperSPARCs. The Connection Machine has a length, width, and height of 1.5 metres. It is divided into 8 equally large cubic sections. Each cubic section contains 16 Printed Circuit Boards and a main processor called a sequencer. Each printed circuit board contains 32 chips. Each chip contains a Communication Channel called a Router , 16 processors, 16 RAMs, and many Electronic Components such as Microchips , Transistors , Diodes , Resistors , and Capacitors . The Connection Machine as a whole has a Routing Network , a main RAM, and an Input/output Processor . It is connected to a switching device called a nexus. The Connection Machine also has an Internal Memory of 512 megabytes and a permanent External Memory of 10 gigabytes. Connection Machines were noted for their (intentional) striking visual design. The CM-2 was cube-shaped with red blinking LED s visible over a large portion of the surface. The CM-5, when viewed from above, looked like a lightning bolt, and also had a large panel of red blinking LEDs. Perhaps because of its design, a CM-5 was featured in the movie '' Jurassic Park '' in the Control Room for the Island . Danny Hillis 's original thesis paper, on which the Connection Machine was based, is ''The Connection Machine (MIT Press Series in Artificial Intelligence)'' (ISBN 0-262-08157-1) . The title is out of print as of 2005. The book provides an overview of the philosophy, architecture and software for the Connection Machine, including data routing between CPU nodes, memory handling, Lisp programming for parallel machines, etc. SEE ALSO
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