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The Connection Machine series (which was featured in Jurassic Park) have the most beautiful LED panels. Reposting some links from a recent Jurassic Park thread

by echelon 9mo ago

The Connection Machine series (which was featured in Jurassic Park) have the most beautiful LED panels. Reposting some links from a recent Jurassic Park thread - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_Machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_Machine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4kBRC2co7Y&t=65s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4kBRC2co7Y&t=65s (Jurassic Park) The LED panel is gorgeous: https://youtube.com/watch?v=6Ko4qBkEcBM https://youtube.com/watch?v=6Ko4qBkEcBM (render) A lot of people have replicated or restored these: https://youtube.com/watch?v=qm6w57ZcJZQ https://youtube.com/watch?v=qm6w57ZcJZQ https://www.housedillon.com/posts/resurrected-led-panels/ https://www.housedillon.com/posts/resurrected-led-panels/

tvarghese7 9mo ago
Worked on the CM-1 and CM2. I felt they were awful buggy. At one point they asked if they could use my code to run as a diagnostic, it would break the log() function on occasion. The Cray fluorinert fountains were way cooler :)
- echelon 9mo ago
  This is so cool to read, thank you for sharing!
- rahen 9mo ago
  Around the same time (1984), there was also another very cool piece of technology that often gets overlooked: the CMU WARP. It wasn’t as flashy as the Crays and the Connection Machine, but it was the first systolic array accelerator (what we’d now call TPUs). It packed as much MFLOPS as a Cray 1. It's also the computer that powered the Chevrolet Navlab self-driving car in 1986.
- Lerc 9mo ago
  I'd be interested to hear what you thought of the programming architecture. Excluding the bug side of things. If they did everything they were supposed to how hard was it to get them to perform a task that distributed the work through the machine. I read some stuff on, I forget, maybe *lisp? I found it rather impenetrable. On top of this, have there been any advances pin software development in the subsequent years that would have been a good fit for the architecture. I always thought it was an under explored idea, having to compete with architectures that were supported by a sotware environment that had much longer to develop.
  - leephillips 9mo ago
    I used them at the (US) Naval Research Laboratory, programming in a dialect of C called C*. This automatically distributed arrays among the many processors, similar to how modern Fortran can work with coarrays. If the problem was very data-parallel, one could get nearly perfect linear speedups.

by echelon 9mo ago

tvarghese7 9mo ago

Worked on the CM-1 and CM2. I felt they were awful buggy. At one point they asked if they could use my code to run as a diagnostic, it would break the log() function on occasion. The Cray fluorinert fountains were way cooler :)

echelon 9mo ago
This is so cool to read, thank you for sharing!
rahen 9mo ago
Around the same time (1984), there was also another very cool piece of technology that often gets overlooked: the CMU WARP. It wasn’t as flashy as the Crays and the Connection Machine, but it was the first systolic array accelerator (what we’d now call TPUs). It packed as much MFLOPS as a Cray 1. It's also the computer that powered the Chevrolet Navlab self-driving car in 1986.
Lerc 9mo ago
I'd be interested to hear what you thought of the programming architecture. Excluding the bug side of things. If they did everything they were supposed to how hard was it to get them to perform a task that distributed the work through the machine. I read some stuff on, I forget, maybe *lisp? I found it rather impenetrable. On top of this, have there been any advances pin software development in the subsequent years that would have been a good fit for the architecture. I always thought it was an under explored idea, having to compete with architectures that were supported by a sotware environment that had much longer to develop.
- leephillips 9mo ago
  I used them at the (US) Naval Research Laboratory, programming in a dialect of C called C*. This automatically distributed arrays among the many processors, similar to how modern Fortran can work with coarrays. If the problem was very data-parallel, one could get nearly perfect linear speedups.