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Where our Mammoth dollars have gone...
Here's the press release on the parallel machine we just purchased.
Our machine will initially be configured with 64 processors sans
vector units. The configuration will change over time as TMC
progresses. The machine is to be installed in the basement of Evans
in the middle of Nov.
11:54 THINKING MACHINES CORPORATION ANNOUNCES CM-5 SUPERCOMPUTER
CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Oct. 29 /PRNewswire/ -- Thinking Machines Corporation
today announced its Connection Machine(R) model CM-5(tm) supercomputer, the
first with a complete parallel architecture that scales to a TeraFlops in
performance. At the same time, the company announced important advances in
software scalability that bring supercomputing firmly into open computing for
the first time. Among these advances is a collaboration between Thinking
Machines, IBM and Sun to pursue a common scalable programming standard for
scientific computing. CM-5 system prices start at $1.4 million.
"We are the first to combine a TeraFlops architecture with the production
computing features that bring parallel supercomputing squarely into the
mainstream," said Sheryl Handler, company president. "First customers include
the Army High Performance Computer Research Center, Schlumberger, University
of Wisconsin, University of California at Berkeley, and the Northeast Parallel
Architecture Center at Syracuse."
John Sell, president of the Minnesota Supercomputer Center, which installed
the first CM-5 for the Army High Performance Computer Research Center in
August, underscored the commercial potential. "CM-5 is the first highly
parallel supercomputer that can be seriously considered for commercial
production environments."
Thinking Machines' chief scientist Danny Hillis, emphasized the importance
of scalable architecture. "Scalability completely changes the questions we
ask about performance. Since you can always increase performance by adding
more processors, the question becomes how far can it grow, and does the I/O,
communications, and reliability grow in proportion with the size of the
system. CM-5 is the first supercomputer that is genuinely scalable in this
sense." Each CM-5 node is a 22-Mips RISC microprocessor with four vector
pipes providing a total of 128 MFlops peak speed. All components of the CM-5
system architecture, including software, I/0, and communications networks,
scale in a balanced way up to systems with 16,000 processing nodes.
Until now, industry growth has been hampered by competing forms of parallel
architecture called "SIMD" and "MIMD." Becuase of CM-5's innovative
architecture, users no longer need to compromise between the programming
simplicity of SIMD and the flexibility of MIMD. The new system provides both,
and includes the synchronization hardware needed for data parallel computing.
Programs running different forms of parallelism may be run simultaneously
under control of the system's full timesharing operating system. Larry Smarr,
director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in Illinois,
said, "The most exciting aspect of the CM-5 is its universal architecture
which will provide one-stop shopping for 1990's applications developers. I
really admire the long-range vision of Thinking Machines. With the CM-5 we
have a scalable architecture that will carry us all the way to a TFlops."
Hillis expanded on the importance of scalable software. "With today's
networks, scientists use mainframes one minute, workstations the next, and
supercomputers the next. In the past, these performance levels have been
locked into their own proprietary language standards. Open, scalable software
gives users the ability to run the same Fortran on a Sun workstation, an IBM
vector supercomputer, and a TeraFlops Connection Machine system. This means
that third-party software developers will be able to maintain a single source
for all types of machines." DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency) funded the original development of scalable architecture as part of
the U.S. High Performance Computing Initiative, and is taking a leadership
role in guiding the industry transition to scalable software.
The transition to scalable software is the focus of Thinking Machines'
initiative in common scalable programming standards for scientific computing.
Joining Thinking Machines in this effort are IBM and Sun Microsystems. This
announcement is significant because the three companies span the range of
scientific computing, from workstations to shared memory multiprocessors to
Grand Challenge supercomputers. Thinking Machines Corporation is the
world's leading manufacturer of highly parallel supercomputers and a pioneer
in scalable computing techniques. The company, which is privately held, is
headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., with offices worldwide.
----
NOTE: Connection Machine is a registered trademark of Thinking Machines
Corporation. CM-5 is a trademark of Thinking Machines Corporation.
/CONTACT: Tim Browne of Thinking Machines Corporation, 617-234-5525/
11:39 EST
PR NEWSWIRE STORY 28 PAGE 1 OF 3
11:54 NEW INITIATIVE IN OPEN, SCALABLE, FORTRAN PROGRAMMING ANNOUNCED
CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Oct. 29 /PRNewswire/ -- Thinking Machines Corporation
announced today an initiative to create a common scalable programming standard
for scientific computing. Joining Thinking Machines in this effort are IBM
and Sun Microsystems. This announcement is significant because the three
companies span the range of scientific computing, from workstations to shared
memory multiprocessors to Grand Challenge supercomputers.
Danny Hillis, chief scientist of Thinking Machines, explained the importance
of scalable software. "With today's networks, scientists use mainframes one
minute, workstations the next, and supercomputers the next. In the past,
these performance levels have been locked into their own proprietary language
standards. The future belongs to scalable applications that run unchanged up
and down performance levels."
Dr. David S. Wehrly, director of high performance supercomputing systems at
IBM, positioned his company's supercomputing directions. "Data parallel (such
as the Fortran 90 array language) is IBM's direction toward exploiting
supercomputer parallel accelerators. IBM intends to participate in external
activities focused on languages and environments to exploit parallel
processing."
Thinking Machines and IBM have previously announced a joint development
agreement between the companies. Thinking Machines pioneered data parallel
programming. Fortran 90 array language is widely used on the company's
Connection Machine(R) supercomputers.
Jon Kannegaard, vice-president of SunPro, a Sun Microsystems Inc. business,
talked about the importance of open scalable software to his company. "Sun
makes workstations and offers shared memory multiprocessors. We are enthused
about Thinking Machines-compatible array extensions in Fortran 90 as a
standard, scalable, programming model for these multiprocessors. It is the
right way to program shared memory machines as well as massively parallel
machines."
Scalable software techniques complete the open computing revolution that
started with portability. Portability allows the same program to run
unchanged across vendors. Scalability allows the same program to run
unchanged up and down performance classes.
Thinking Machines Corporation is the world's leading manufacturer of highly
parallel supercomputers and the pioneer in scalable computing techniques. The
architecture of its CM-5(tm) supercomputer is the first to scale to a trillion
operations per second (TeraFlops), the performance level required by the new
set of computing applications called the Grand Challenges.
----
NOTE: Connection Machine is a registered trademark of Thinking Machines
Corporation. CM-5 is a trademark of Thinking Machines Corporation.
/CONTACT: Tim Browne of Thinking Machines Corporation, 617-234-5525/
11:38 EST
Date: Thu, 31 Oct 91 17:45:40 PST
From: Dave Patterson <pattrsn@sparc.Berkeley.EDU>
CM-5 supports both MIMD and SIMD
Control Network (supporting SIMD)
Data Network (supporting MIMD)
Supports both MIMD and SIMD software: old compilers work, and TMC
customers have ported Intel and Ncube software to machine.
Network bandwidth scales with number of nodes, both for control and
for data badnwidth. Scales linearly, that is.
Berkeley, Wisconsin, and Syracuse (Geoffery Fox) have machines
Amex has 2 machines, Schlumberger is getting 1.
Lawrence Livermore is getting a 1024 node machine.
Army research lab run by University of Minnesota has had a machine
for a few months,and was the first installation. Claim was that last
month had 98% availability of all 524 nodes.
Machine is designed to work in presense of failures: can isolate bad
parts (nodes or net links) and map in spare nodes to restart from last
check point. Really designed to work in large configurations.
I am biased since I consulted on this machine, but I think this is a
VERY significant computer announcement. This is my bet as the machine
that most people will be using when trying to reach 1 TFLOPS.
Time will tell, but this may be as significant as the announcement of
machines like the Cray-1, the VAX-11/780, SPARC/MIPS, ...
Dave
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