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Obviously, please share when you do. Is the technical information needed readily available? Just curious. I took a parallel computing class decades ago in col

by timmg 3y ago

Obviously, please share when you do. Is the technical information needed readily available? Just curious. I took a parallel computing class decades ago in college and we programmed a Connection Machine. I think a CM-2. Maybe CM-1? IIRC, we used Fortran with some extensions. Was so cool and interesting. But never did touch one since…

monocasa 3y ago
> Obviously, please share when you do. Totes, I've time boxed my work to the end of next year for releasing. I basically want to get a good conference talk out of it for ol' CV. > Is the technical information needed readily available? It's available if you're willing to dig for it. There are tape images on bitsavers for a sun4 frontend. While being failed reads, I wrote some custom tooling to extract what I can. It looks like the vast majority of the failures were in a couple starlisp images for which I have a newer copy. Beyond that, man pages, header files, prelinked static libraries with a bunch of symbols, microcode images, administration utilities, config files, and source to the kernel driver which exposes the control signals and command fifos to user space are all available. That's in addition quite a bit of pdf documention. So the problem is more than tractable, there's just work involved at this point. The biggest piece missing is probably pictures of the processor, microcontroller, and backplane boards to better answer questions about the microcode. Everyone I've contacted with a CM-2 these days really only has the chassis and the blinkenlights. : /
- larsbrinkhoff 3y ago
  Put me on the mailing list!
- nonrandomstring 3y ago
  Somewhere out there is video footage of Hillis and some MIT bods wiring up the CM-1. Pretty sure it appears in Adam Curtis' "All watched over" doco. Looks like they're using wirewrap tools and literally doing point-to-point.

by timmg 3y ago

monocasa 3y ago

> Obviously, please share when you do. Totes, I've time boxed my work to the end of next year for releasing. I basically want to get a good conference talk out of it for ol' CV. > Is the technical information needed readily available? It's available if you're willing to dig for it. There are tape images on bitsavers for a sun4 frontend. While being failed reads, I wrote some custom tooling to extract what I can. It looks like the vast majority of the failures were in a couple starlisp images for which I have a newer copy. Beyond that, man pages, header files, prelinked static libraries with a bunch of symbols, microcode images, administration utilities, config files, and source to the kernel driver which exposes the control signals and command fifos to user space are all available. That's in addition quite a bit of pdf documention. So the problem is more than tractable, there's just work involved at this point. The biggest piece missing is probably pictures of the processor, microcontroller, and backplane boards to better answer questions about the microcode. Everyone I've contacted with a CM-2 these days really only has the chassis and the blinkenlights. : /

larsbrinkhoff 3y ago
Put me on the mailing list!
nonrandomstring 3y ago
Somewhere out there is video footage of Hillis and some MIT bods wiring up the CM-1. Pretty sure it appears in Adam Curtis' "All watched over" doco. Looks like they're using wirewrap tools and literally doing point-to-point.