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Connection Machine CM-1 Dead

Connection Machine CM-1
KindMachine
Introduced1985
Discontinued1989
StatusDead
ManufacturerThinking Machines
ClassSupercomputer
Platform65,536 1-bit processors
Sourcebitsavers.org ↗

Danny Hillis's massively parallel dream — 65,536 tiny processors under a cube of blinking LEDs. Programmed in *Lisp; beautiful, radical, commercially doomed.

Created by Thinking Machines Corporation

Hillis's CM-1 (1985) — 65,536 one-bit processors in a hypercube, each with 4K memory — was the largest SIMD machine attempted. Tamiko Thiel's cube-of-cubes design with blinking status LEDs made it the most beautiful supercomputer ever built.

The CM-2 reached 5.2 GFLOPS; it was the fastest machine on Earth briefly, but the parallel-software problem defeated commercialization. Thinking Machines filed Chapter 11 in 1994.

Sources

  1. bitsavers.org/pdf/thinkingMachines/
  2. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_Machine