CM-5

Specialty Definition: Connection Machine

(From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia)

The Connection Machine was a series of supercomputers that grew out of Danny Hillis's research in the early 1980s at MIT on alternatives to the traditional von Neumann architecture of computation. The CM-1, developed at MIT, was a "massively parallel" hypercube arrangement of thousands of very simple processors, each with their own RAM.
Hillis and Sheryl Handler founded Thinking Machines in Waltham, Massachusetts and assembled a team to develop the CM-2, which depending on the configuration had as many as 64k processors. A later modification added numeric co-processors to the system, with some fixed number of the original simple processors sharing each numeric processor.
With the CM-5, Thinking Machines switched from the CM-2's hypercube architecture of simple processors to a fat tree network of RISC processors (Sun SPARCs).
The full list of Connection Machine models, in order of when they were introduced: CM-1, CM-2, CM-200, CM-5, CM-5E.
Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia under a copyleft GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) from the article "Connection Machine."

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