| Yes this article is very old, and really only scratches the surface of Hillis' genius and puts a business failure angle on it. Here's a great video describing the architecture of the CM-5 https://youtu.be/Ua-swPZTeX4 Note how similar the programming concepts are to CUDA (at an abstract level). Hillis also in the 80s published his MIT thesis as a book: The Connection Machine https://www.amazon.com/Connection-Machine-Press-Artificial-I... An incredibly well written and fascinating read, just as relevant today for programming a GPU as it was for programming the ancient beast of a CM-2. It's about algorithms, graphs, map/reduce, and other techniques of parallelism pioneered at Thinking Machines. For example, Guy Blelloch worked at TM, and pioneered prefix scans on these machines, now common techniques used on GPUs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5sM-4ODXaA http://uenics.evansville.edu/~mr56/ece757/DataParallelAlgori... There's also been a lot of hum lately on HN about APL, much of Hillis' *Lisp ideas come from parallelizing array processing primitives ("zectors" and "zappings"), ideas that originating in APL as he acknowledged in the paper describing the language: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.108... What's old is new... again. |
Also of note is that * Lisp described by Hillis' paper (xectors and xappings with more or less hidfen mapping to hardware) is completely different from * Lisp that was actually sold by TMC, which handled embedding of the problem geometry into hardware, but otherwise was Paris assembler (ie. what you send through the phenomenally thick cable from frontend to CM to make stuff happen) bolted onto Common Lisp. IIRC the commercial *Lisp got somehow opensourced and you can run it (in emulation mode) on top of SBCL.