The Connection Machine (1988)
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Thinking Machines Corporation produced a family of high performance computer systems. The largest member of the family in the late 1980's was the 64,000 processer CM-2 with performance in excess of 2500 MIPs, and floating point performance above 2500 MFlops.... It's successor, the CM-5, appeared in the movie "Jurassic
Park." I built and serviced several CM-2 systems - see my projects, and co-invented aspects of the high-performance fault tolerant DataVault as described in the DataVault patent. |
| CM-2 General Specifications
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| Processors | 65,536 | |
| Memory | 512 Mbytes | |
| Memory Bandwidth | 300Gbits/Sec | |
| I/O Channels | 8 | |
| Capacity per Channel | 40 Mbytes/Sec | |
| Max. Transfer Rate | 320 Mbytes/Sec | |
| DataVault Specifications
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| Storage Capacity | 5 or 10 Gbytes |
| I/O Interfaces | 2 |
| Transfer Rate, Burst | 40 Mbytes/Sec |
| Max. Aggregate Rate | 320 Mbytes/Sec |
The DataVault uses a unique patented RAID design which maximizes uptime, operating at full bandwidth and full data integrity even during a disk unit failure.
[At the height of their popularity, there were over 30 Connection Machines installed, including sites such as Los Alamos National Labs, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and dozens of universities. Thinking Machines Corp. underwent Chapter 11 reorganization in the 1993's, reorganized into a Data-Mining software corporation, which was later purchased by Oracle in 1999.]