5 ms·

I’m delighted they mentioned TAOS and (following through) the amazing Transputer architecture of the 1980s. Being a teen ‘interested’ in computers in the early

by qubex 5y ago

I’m delighted they mentioned TAOS and (following through) the amazing Transputer architecture of the 1980s. Being a teen ‘interested’ in computers in the early 1990s I was fascinated by massively parallel architectures (Connection Machine 1/2 and Connection Machine 5, IBM’s SP/2 “scalable parallel” RS/6000 based machines, and the Transputer concept) and I’m still figuring out whether GPUs are true embodiments of that concept or not.

yvdriess 5y ago
The Tilera [1] processors were a recent embodiment of the Transputer. (comedy option: the TIS-100 [2]) Modern GPU architectures are very much their own thing. They have more in common with Vector machines in how the ALUs are organized, but the macro control flow is more like Dataflow architectures. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TILEPro64 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TILEPro64 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TIS-100 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TIS-100
- mst 5y ago
  TIS-100 is my current favourite puzzle game and the plethora of implementations on github plus the various community resources (including a rather good subrediit) make it even more fun. If it sounds interesting, I recommend https://alandesmet.github.io/TIS-100-Hackers-Guide/ https://alandesmet.github.io/TIS-100-Hackers-Guide/ as a starting point.
dfox 5y ago
Massively parallel was just an marketing buzzword that was used for a lot of different things. One thing to look for is wether all the compute elements run from same clock or not. CM1/2 is SIMD machine that is mostly nothing more than FPGA turned inside out and in fact just an accelerator that cannot do anything useful standalone (control flow is mostly done in software on the frontend machine). In this regard it is somewhat similar to today's GPUs. SP/2 is more or less equivalent of the "Beowulf clusters" of the turn of certury and Slashdot fame, that is bunch of computers with full OS instances connected together with some reasonably fast network. But done few years before on somewhat specialized IBM hardware (And well, Myrinet of the early large Linux based clusters was kind of funky specialized hardware, with these 18pair Cat5 cables...). CM5 is weird as it is cluster of more or less off the shelf SPARC nodes with several independent communications networks with one of the networks being capable of doing bunch of "collective communications" (reduce, broadcast...) operations in hardware. As with CM1/2 it does not run any kind of OS and is mostly managed by some set of frontend computers than do the job setup and network configuration for each new job. And then transputer is not an concept, there was real hardware and solar system is full of things that are directly descended from that hardware. The issue with transputers as an HPC platform (even for the early 90's) is that the nodes are too small, slow and have too slow interconnect to be meaningfully usable as general purpose HPC platform because you end up using significant fraction of the potential performance for housekeeping tasks (notice that above mentioned CM1/2/5 has some out of band method for the frontend to manage the nodes and even directly access their local memory, on transputers this had to be done through the main communication network and supported by software running on the nodes themselves, which makes even booting the thing an interesting excercise in parallel programming).
- __d 5y ago
  I'd have to dig out the documentation, but I think Tilera addressed some of the Transputer's link limitations by having five (and six in the TilePro64) separate communications meshes between the cores. There's one mesh each for: memory access, packet transfers, user data network, cache misses, and IPC. The Pro added a cache coherency mesh too. Sadly, Tilera was bought by EZChip, who were bought by Mellanox, who were bought by NVIDIA, and the Tilera processors don't seem to be available or being updated.
lproven 5y ago
Glad to hear it. :-) Tilera was very cool. Maybe too much too young, though? It was MIPS not Transputer based, AFAIK, but maybe I am misunderstanding you. Both the Transputer and Alpha are CPU arches I think could still be usefully resurrected. Re the Transputer, this earlier piece of mine may interest: https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/06/heliosng/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/06/heliosng/

by qubex 5y ago

yvdriess 5y ago

The Tilera [1] processors were a recent embodiment of the Transputer. (comedy option: the TIS-100 [2]) Modern GPU architectures are very much their own thing. They have more in common with Vector machines in how the ALUs are organized, but the macro control flow is more like Dataflow architectures. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TILEPro64 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TILEPro64 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TIS-100 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TIS-100

mst 5y ago
TIS-100 is my current favourite puzzle game and the plethora of implementations on github plus the various community resources (including a rather good subrediit) make it even more fun. If it sounds interesting, I recommend https://alandesmet.github.io/TIS-100-Hackers-Guide/ https://alandesmet.github.io/TIS-100-Hackers-Guide/ as a starting point.

dfox 5y ago

Massively parallel was just an marketing buzzword that was used for a lot of different things. One thing to look for is wether all the compute elements run from same clock or not. CM1/2 is SIMD machine that is mostly nothing more than FPGA turned inside out and in fact just an accelerator that cannot do anything useful standalone (control flow is mostly done in software on the frontend machine). In this regard it is somewhat similar to today's GPUs. SP/2 is more or less equivalent of the "Beowulf clusters" of the turn of certury and Slashdot fame, that is bunch of computers with full OS instances connected together with some reasonably fast network. But done few years before on somewhat specialized IBM hardware (And well, Myrinet of the early large Linux based clusters was kind of funky specialized hardware, with these 18pair Cat5 cables...). CM5 is weird as it is cluster of more or less off the shelf SPARC nodes with several independent communications networks with one of the networks being capable of doing bunch of "collective communications" (reduce, broadcast...) operations in hardware. As with CM1/2 it does not run any kind of OS and is mostly managed by some set of frontend computers than do the job setup and network configuration for each new job. And then transputer is not an concept, there was real hardware and solar system is full of things that are directly descended from that hardware. The issue with transputers as an HPC platform (even for the early 90's) is that the nodes are too small, slow and have too slow interconnect to be meaningfully usable as general purpose HPC platform because you end up using significant fraction of the potential performance for housekeeping tasks (notice that above mentioned CM1/2/5 has some out of band method for the frontend to manage the nodes and even directly access their local memory, on transputers this had to be done through the main communication network and supported by software running on the nodes themselves, which makes even booting the thing an interesting excercise in parallel programming).

__d 5y ago
I'd have to dig out the documentation, but I think Tilera addressed some of the Transputer's link limitations by having five (and six in the TilePro64) separate communications meshes between the cores. There's one mesh each for: memory access, packet transfers, user data network, cache misses, and IPC. The Pro added a cache coherency mesh too. Sadly, Tilera was bought by EZChip, who were bought by Mellanox, who were bought by NVIDIA, and the Tilera processors don't seem to be available or being updated.

lproven 5y ago

Glad to hear it. :-) Tilera was very cool. Maybe too much too young, though? It was MIPS not Transputer based, AFAIK, but maybe I am misunderstanding you. Both the Transputer and Alpha are CPU arches I think could still be usefully resurrected. Re the Transputer, this earlier piece of mine may interest: https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/06/heliosng/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/06/heliosng/