The Connection Machine was a SIMD design and the languages available for it (StarLisp: https://omohundro.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/omohundro86_the_essential_s

The Connection Machine was a SIMD design and the languages available for it (StarLisp: https://omohundro.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/omohundro86_the_essential_starlisp_manual.pdf https://omohundro.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/omohundro86_th... and C*: http://people.csail.mit.edu/bradley/cm5docs/CStarProgrammingGuide.pdf http://people.csail.mit.edu/bradley/cm5docs/CStarProgramming...) were actually pretty good compared to OpenCL. The Connection Machine Lisp programming language described in Daniel Hillis' PhD dissertation was essentially going to be Lisp with parallel map/reduce but AFAIK was never done being implemented. I think the big problem was that most of the SIMD algorithms were yet to be discovered at the time. For example this paper by Hillis and Steele was a very big deal but looks kind of basic today: http://uenics.evansville.edu/~mr56/ece757/DataParallelAlgorithms.pdf http://uenics.evansville.edu/~mr56/ece757/DataParallelAlgori... Guy Blelloch did a lot of work on Connection Machines and basically wrote the book on SIMD programming: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~blelloch/papers/Ble90.pdf http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~blelloch/papers/Ble90.pdf He also made a very nice programming language for parallel computing (NESL), as did Gary Sabot who worked at Connection Machines (Paralations). When you compare those to Hadoop or OpenCL it really is a wonder where we went wrong and what the designers of the latter were thinking (or not).