[SunRescue] Cheap big iron

[Joshua D. Boyd]

On Fri, 6 Apr 2001, John Duksta wrote:
> Yeah, I was thinking of borrowing a friends truck and
> heading over to pick it up. But, I just don't think I
> could convince the other folks in the condo assoc to
> let me take up half the basement with it. :)
 
> Plus, what the heck would I do with it? I don't have
> a lot of weather/earthquake simulation work to do :)
 
My understanding is that the CMs specialized in other forms of computation
than traditional vector processing.  One of the main programming languages
for the CMs is a special version of LISP.  AI was a popular useage.  My
understanding is that a lot of today's market analysis and data-mining
tools (by tools, I'm not refering to specific programs, but rather
tecniques) were originally developed on the Connection Machines.

That said, a 64k machine setup as a 12 dimensional cube would lend its
self to having a voxel on each CPU in a 8192^3 world at 60 steps per
second.  I actually don't know how many steps could be calculated per
second since I don't know how powerful each processor was, but I'm
guessing that each processor could fixure out what processors to hand it's
voxel to in only a reletively few processor cycles, and I'd be suprised if
the machine ran an less than 1khz.

If anyone know's anything about CFD, sorry for any possible mangling I've
done to the topic.  I have no books on CFD.  Just a book on particle
motion, and a lot of experiments with particles as voxels, and tying
particles together with springs for objects, and adding some motion
vectors to the particles.  Hell, I'm only now taking a real linear algebra
course.  I tend to mangle and topic I touch.


--
Joshua Boyd