3 ms·

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() fu

• echelon 8mo ago
  This is so cool to read, thank you for sharing!
• rahen 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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.