Very well written thesis. The machine, however, was extraordinarily difficult to program, resulting in Thinking Machine's quick death once they actually tried to compete commercially with Convex and Cray.
It wasn't really an open market since the US Gov was the only customer. They liked to spread money around to keep some kind of competition going. There were a lot of fans of the CM architecture. It did take substantial work to get a code running, but once you did the price performance scaling and stability was pretty nice. Enough people had gone through that process that there were plenty of codes that would have like to have continued running.
The generally accepted narrative is that TMC upper management really screwed up. More tactically the CM-5 really stumbled, with a host of hardware, system software, compiler and environment problems. Right before they folded it was starting to be a really nice platform to use. But very expensive, and the 2-3 years from the CM-2 to that point were quite dark.
If you look at the Cray machines from the last 5-10 years they are pretty similar to the CM-5
- fat tree-like guaranteed delivery message network with credits
- commodity processors and the primary node type
- attached vector processors
- front end nodes running commodity OS
of course there are lots of subtle differences, but if you squint...of course the language environments aren't the same (except of course for parallel fortran :/)
Nope, USG was only ~1/3 the market for supercomputing back then. There were lots of industrial uses for supercomputing (e.g. computational fluid dynamics calculations to design tires that hydroplaned less, flame dynamics to create more efficient engines, finite element analysis to model parasitic effects in semiconductors, ..) However the market for the TMC was indeed almost exclusively the USG (or research departments at a few large corporations, and a few universities) because no one could figure out how to program it for something useful - as mentioned before, it was really, really hard to program anything more than a really constrained scenario on the CM.
I spent several years programming the CM-2, and it was a joy to program, and not difficult at all (for most things). I still miss C* in some ways.
Also, see the Inc. article about why they went out of business... it was REALLY bad arrogance about what markets to try to work. They categorically refused to do anything for "ordinary" business problems.
The generally accepted narrative is that TMC upper management really screwed up. More tactically the CM-5 really stumbled, with a host of hardware, system software, compiler and environment problems. Right before they folded it was starting to be a really nice platform to use. But very expensive, and the 2-3 years from the CM-2 to that point were quite dark.
If you look at the Cray machines from the last 5-10 years they are pretty similar to the CM-5 - fat tree-like guaranteed delivery message network with credits - commodity processors and the primary node type - attached vector processors - front end nodes running commodity OS
of course there are lots of subtle differences, but if you squint...of course the language environments aren't the same (except of course for parallel fortran :/)