Thinking Machines Corporation was a
supercomputerA supercomputer is a computer that is at the frontline of current processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation. Supercomputers were introduced in the 1960s and were designed primarily by Seymour Cray at Control Data Corporation , and led the market into the 1970s until Cray left to form...
manufacturer founded in
Waltham, MassachusettsWaltham is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, billed by the Chamber of Commerce as the "birthplace of the American industrial revolution", and an early center for the labor movement. The original home of the Boston Manufacturing Company, the city was a prototype for 19th...
in 1982 by
W. Daniel "Danny" HillisWilliam Daniel "Danny" Hillis is an American inventor, entrepreneur, and author. He co-founded Thinking Machines Corporation, a company that developed the Connection Machine, a parallel supercomputer designed by Hillis at MIT...
and
Sheryl HandlerSheryl Handler was one of the founders of Thinking Machines and is the founder and current CEO of Ab Initio software.Reference:http://www.inc.com/magazine/19950915/2622.html...
to turn Hillis's doctoral work at MIT on
massively parallel computingParallel computing is a form of computation in which many calculations are carried out simultaneously, operating on the principle that large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which are then solved concurrently . There are several different forms of parallel computing: bit-level,...
architectures into a commercial product called the
Connection MachineThe Connection Machine was a series of supercomputers that grew out of Danny Hillis's research in the early 1980s at MIT on alternatives to the traditional von Neumann architecture of computation...
. The company moved in 1984 from Waltham to
Kendall SquareKendall Square is a neighborhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with the "square" itself at the intersection of Main Street, Broadway, Wadsworth Street, and Third Street...
in
Cambridge, MassachusettsCambridge is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, in the Greater Boston area. It was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England, a nexus of the Puritan theology embraced by the town's founders. Notably, Cambridge is home to two internationally prominent...
, close to the MIT AI Lab and Thinking Machines' competitor
Kendall Square ResearchKendall Square Research was a supercomputer company headquartered originally in Kendall Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1986, near MIT. It was co-founded by Steven Frank and Henry Burkhardt III, who had previously helped found Data General and Encore Computer and was one of the original...
. Besides Kendall Square Research, Thinking Machines' competitors included
MasParMasPar Computer Corporation was a minisupercomputer vendor that was founded in 1987 by Jeff Kalb. The company was based in Santa Clara, California....
, which made a computer similar to the
CM-2The Connection Machine was a series of supercomputers that grew out of Danny Hillis's research in the early 1980s at MIT on alternatives to the traditional von Neumann architecture of computation...
, and
MeikoMeiko Scientific Ltd. was a British supercomputer company based in Bristol, founded by members of the design team working on the INMOS transputer microprocessor.-History:...
, whose CS-2 was similar to the
CM-5The Connection Machine was a series of supercomputers that grew out of Danny Hillis's research in the early 1980s at MIT on alternatives to the traditional von Neumann architecture of computation...
.
Thinking Machines Corporation was a
supercomputerA supercomputer is a computer that is at the frontline of current processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation. Supercomputers were introduced in the 1960s and were designed primarily by Seymour Cray at Control Data Corporation , and led the market into the 1970s until Cray left to form...
manufacturer founded in
Waltham, MassachusettsWaltham is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, billed by the Chamber of Commerce as the "birthplace of the American industrial revolution", and an early center for the labor movement. The original home of the Boston Manufacturing Company, the city was a prototype for 19th...
in 1982 by
W. Daniel "Danny" HillisWilliam Daniel "Danny" Hillis is an American inventor, entrepreneur, and author. He co-founded Thinking Machines Corporation, a company that developed the Connection Machine, a parallel supercomputer designed by Hillis at MIT...
and
Sheryl HandlerSheryl Handler was one of the founders of Thinking Machines and is the founder and current CEO of Ab Initio software.Reference:http://www.inc.com/magazine/19950915/2622.html...
to turn Hillis's doctoral work at MIT on
massively parallel computingParallel computing is a form of computation in which many calculations are carried out simultaneously, operating on the principle that large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which are then solved concurrently . There are several different forms of parallel computing: bit-level,...
architectures into a commercial product called the
Connection MachineThe Connection Machine was a series of supercomputers that grew out of Danny Hillis's research in the early 1980s at MIT on alternatives to the traditional von Neumann architecture of computation...
. The company moved in 1984 from Waltham to
Kendall SquareKendall Square is a neighborhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with the "square" itself at the intersection of Main Street, Broadway, Wadsworth Street, and Third Street...
in
Cambridge, MassachusettsCambridge is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, in the Greater Boston area. It was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England, a nexus of the Puritan theology embraced by the town's founders. Notably, Cambridge is home to two internationally prominent...
, close to the MIT AI Lab and Thinking Machines' competitor
Kendall Square ResearchKendall Square Research was a supercomputer company headquartered originally in Kendall Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1986, near MIT. It was co-founded by Steven Frank and Henry Burkhardt III, who had previously helped found Data General and Encore Computer and was one of the original...
. Besides Kendall Square Research, Thinking Machines' competitors included
MasParMasPar Computer Corporation was a minisupercomputer vendor that was founded in 1987 by Jeff Kalb. The company was based in Santa Clara, California....
, which made a computer similar to the
CM-2The Connection Machine was a series of supercomputers that grew out of Danny Hillis's research in the early 1980s at MIT on alternatives to the traditional von Neumann architecture of computation...
, and
MeikoMeiko Scientific Ltd. was a British supercomputer company based in Bristol, founded by members of the design team working on the INMOS transputer microprocessor.-History:...
, whose CS-2 was similar to the
CM-5The Connection Machine was a series of supercomputers that grew out of Danny Hillis's research in the early 1980s at MIT on alternatives to the traditional von Neumann architecture of computation...
. The company filed for bankruptcy in 1994, with its hardware and parallel computing software divisions eventually acquired by
Sun MicrosystemsSun Microsystems, Inc. is a multinational vendor of computers, computer components, computer software, and information technology services, founded on February 24, 1982...
.
- "We're building a machine that will be proud of us." – Thinking Machines' motto
Products
Thinking Machines produced a number of
Connection MachineThe Connection Machine was a series of supercomputers that grew out of Danny Hillis's research in the early 1980s at MIT on alternatives to the traditional von Neumann architecture of computation...
models (in chronological order): the CM-1, CM-2, CM-200, CM-5, and the CM-5E. The CM-1 and 2 came first in models with 64K (65,536) bit-serial processors (16 processors per chip) and later smaller configurations(16,384 (16K) and 4,096 (4K) processors). The Connection Machine was programmed in a variety of specialized languages, including
*LispThe *Lisp programming language was conceived of in 1985 by Cliff Lasser and Steve Omohundro as a way of providing an efficient yet high-level language for programming the nascent Connection Machine.-Prelude:At the time the Connection Machine was being designed and built, the only language being...
and CM Lisp (derived from
Common LispCommon Lisp, commonly abbreviated CL, is a dialect of the Lisp programming language, published in ANSI standard document ANSI INCITS 226-1994 , . Developed to standardize the divergent variants of Lisp which predated it, it is not an implementation but rather a language specification...
),
C*C* is an object-oriented, data-parallel superset of ANSI C with synchronous semantics, for the Connection Machine, designed by Thinking Machines, 1987. C* adds a "domain" data type and a selection statement for parallel execution in domains....
(derived from
CC is a general-purpose computer programming language developed in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....
), and CM
FORTRANFortran is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing...
. These languages used proprietary compilers to translate code into the parallel instruction set of the Connection Machine. The CM-1 through CM-200 were examples of
SIMDIn computing, SIMD is a technique employed to achieve data level parallelism.- History :...
architecture (Single Instruction Multiple Data), while the later CM-5 and CM-5E were
MIMDIn computing, MIMD is a technique employed to achieve parallelism. Machines using MIMD have a number of processors that function asynchronously and independently. At any time, different processors may be executing different instructions on different pieces of data...
(Multiple Instructions Multiple Data) using commodity
SPARCSPARC is a RISC instruction set architecture developed by Sun Microsystems introduced in 1986.SPARC is a registered trademark of SPARC International, Inc., an organization established in 1989 to promote the SPARC architecture and to provide conformance testing...
processors combined with proprietary vector processors in a "
fat treeThe fat tree network, invented by Charles E. Leiserson of MIT, is a universal network for provably efficient communication. Unlike an ordinary computer scientist's notion of a tree, which has "skinny" links all over, the links in a fat-tree become "fatter" as one moves up the tree towards the root...
" network. Thinking Machines also introduced the first commercial
RAIDRAID is an acronym first defined by David A. Patterson, Garth A. Gibson, and Randy Katz at the University of California, Berkeley in 1987 to describe a redundant array of inexpensive disks, a technology that allowed computer users to achieve high levels of storage reliability from low-cost and less...
disk array, called the DataVault, in 1985.
The CM-2 required a
SymbolicsSymbolics refers to two companies: now-defunct computer manufacturer Symbolics, Inc., and a privately held company that acquired the assets of the former company and continues to sell and maintain the Open Genera Lisp system and the Macsyma computer algebra system.The symbolics.com domain was...
3600 LISP machine as a front-end processor; later models used a
Sun MicrosystemsSun Microsystems, Inc. is a multinational vendor of computers, computer components, computer software, and information technology services, founded on February 24, 1982...
workstation or
VAXVAX was an instruction set architecture developed by Digital Equipment Corporation in the mid-1970s. A 32-bit complex instruction set computer ISA, it was designed to extend or replace DEC's various Programmed Data Processor ISAs...
minicomputer.
Thinking Machines developed the C* programming language as an extension of the C programming language for the Connection Machine data parallel computing system.
Business history
Thinking Machines became profitable in 1989 thanks to its DARPA contracts, and in 1990 the company had $65 million (USD) in revenue, making it the market leader in parallel supercomputers. In 1991, DARPA reduced its purchases amid criticism it was unfairly subsidizing Thinking Machines at the expense of other vendors like
CrayCray Inc. is a supercomputer manufacturer based in Seattle, Washington. The company's predecessor, Cray Research, Inc. , was founded in 1972 by computer designer Seymour Cray. Already a legend in his field by this time, Cray put his company on the map in 1976 with the release of the Cray-1 vector...
,
IBMInternational Business Machines Corporation, abbreviated IBM, is a multinational computer technology and IT consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, Town of North Castle, New York, United States. The company is one of the few information technology companies with a continuous history dating...
, and in particular,
NCUBEnCUBE was a series of parallel computing computers from the company of the same name. Early generations of the hardware used a custom microprocessor...
and
MasParMasPar Computer Corporation was a minisupercomputer vendor that was founded in 1987 by Jeff Kalb. The company was based in Santa Clara, California....
. By 1992 the company was losing money again, due to lack of business; CEO
Sheryl HandlerSheryl Handler was one of the founders of Thinking Machines and is the founder and current CEO of Ab Initio software.Reference:http://www.inc.com/magazine/19950915/2622.html...
was forced out in the face of public criticism.
Thinking Machines filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in August 1994. The hardware portion of the company was purchased by
Sun MicrosystemsSun Microsystems, Inc. is a multinational vendor of computers, computer components, computer software, and information technology services, founded on February 24, 1982...
, and TMC re-emerged as a small software company specializing in parallel software tools for commodity clusters and
data miningData mining is the process of extracting patterns from data. As more data are gathered, with the amount of data doubling every three years, data mining is becoming an increasingly important tool to transform these data into information...
software for its installed base and former competitors' parallel supercomputers. In December 1996, the parallel software development business was acquired by
Sun MicrosystemsSun Microsystems, Inc. is a multinational vendor of computers, computer components, computer software, and information technology services, founded on February 24, 1982...
, forming the basis of Sun's entry into High Performance Computing.
Thinking Machines continued as a pure data mining company until it was acquired in 1999 by
Oracle CorporationOracle Corporation specializes in developing and marketing enterprise software products — particularly database management systems. Through organic growth and a number of high-profile acquisitions, Oracle enlarged its share of the software market...
.
The program
WAISWide Area Information Servers or WAIS is a client-server text searching system that uses the ANSI Standard Z39.50 Information Retrieval Service Definition and Protocol Specifications for Library Applications" to search index databases on remote computers...
, developed at Thinking Machines by
Brewster KahleBrewster Kahle is a computer engineer, internet entrepreneur, activist, and digital librarian. He graduated from MIT in 1982 with a BS degree in Computer Science & Engineering where he was a member of the Chi Phi Fraternity. The emphasis of his studies was artificial intelligence; he studied...
, would later be influential in starting the
Internet ArchiveThe Internet Archive is a nonprofit organization dedicated to building and maintaining a free and openly accessible online digital library, including an archive of the World Wide Web....
and associated projects including the Rosetta Disk as part of Danny Hillis' Clock of the Long Now.
Key architect
Greg PapadopoulosGreg Papadopoulos, Ph.D. is the current Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Sun Microsystems. He is the creator and lead proponent for Redshift, a theory on whether technology markets are over or under-served by Moore's Law....
later became Sun Microsystems, Inc.'s Chief Technology Officer.
Dispersal
Many of the hardware people left for
Sun MicrosystemsSun Microsystems, Inc. is a multinational vendor of computers, computer components, computer software, and information technology services, founded on February 24, 1982...
and went on to design the
Sun EnterpriseSun Enterprise is a range of UNIX server computers produced by Sun Microsystems from 1996 to 2001. The line was launched as the Sun Ultra Enterprise series; the Ultra prefix was dropped around 1998. These systems were based on the 64-bit UltraSPARC microprocessor architecture and related to the...
series of parallel computers. The Darwin datamining toolkit, developed by Thinking Machines' Business Supercomputer Group, was purchased by
OracleOracle Corporation specializes in developing and marketing enterprise software products — particularly database management systems. Through organic growth and a number of high-profile acquisitions, Oracle enlarged its share of the software market...
. Most of the team that built
Darwin left for
Dun & BradstreetThe Dun & Bradstreet Corporation , headquartered in Short Hills, New Jersey, USA, is a provider of credit information on businesses and corporations...
soon after the company entered bankruptcy.
Thinking Machines alumni ("thunkos") were instrumental in forming several parallel computing software start-ups, including
Ab InitioAb Initio Software Corporation was founded in the mid 1990's by the former CEO of Thinking Machines Corporation, Sheryl Handler, and several other former employees after the bankruptcy of that company....
Software and Applied Parallel Technologies.
Ab InitioAb Initio Software Corporation was founded in the mid 1990's by the former CEO of Thinking Machines Corporation, Sheryl Handler, and several other former employees after the bankruptcy of that company....
is still an independent company; Applied Parallel Technologies, later renamed to
Torrent SystemsTorrent Systems, originally named Applied Parallel Technologies, was a parallel computing software company founded in 1993 by Rob Utzschneider and Ed Zyszkowski. The company's product was a parallel flow-based programming system called Castrate...
, was acquired by Ascential Software, which was in turn acquired by
IBMInternational Business Machines Corporation, abbreviated IBM, is a multinational computer technology and IT consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, Town of North Castle, New York, United States. The company is one of the few information technology companies with a continuous history dating...
.
Besides Danny Hillis, other noted people who worked for or with the company included
Greg PapadopoulosGreg Papadopoulos, Ph.D. is the current Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Sun Microsystems. He is the creator and lead proponent for Redshift, a theory on whether technology markets are over or under-served by Moore's Law....
, David Waltz, Guy L Steele, Jr.,
Karl SimsKarl Sims is a computer graphics artist and researcher, who is most well known for using particle systems and artificial life in computer animation....
,
Brewster KahleBrewster Kahle is a computer engineer, internet entrepreneur, activist, and digital librarian. He graduated from MIT in 1982 with a BS degree in Computer Science & Engineering where he was a member of the Chi Phi Fraternity. The emphasis of his studies was artificial intelligence; he studied...
, Bradley Kuszmaul,
Charles E. LeisersonCharles Eric Leiserson is a computer scientist, specializing in the theory of parallel computing and distributed computing, and particularly practical applications thereof; as part of this effort, he developed the Cilk multithreaded language...
,
Marvin MinskyMarvin Lee Minsky is an American cognitive scientist in the field of artificial intelligence , co-founder of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, and author of several texts on AI and philosophy.-Biography:...
,
Carl FeynmanCarl Richard Feynman is a computer engineer and an author. He is the son of physicist Richard P. Feynman, and the brother of Michelle Feynman....
, Cliff Lasser, Marvin Denicoff, Alex Vasilevsky, Doug Lenat,
Stephen WolframStephen Wolfram is a British physicist, software developer, mathematician, computer programmer, author and businessman, known for his work in theoretical particle physics, cosmology, cellular automata, complexity theory, computer algebra and the Wolfram Alpha computational knowledge engine.-...
,
Eric LanderEric Steven Lander is a Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , a member of the Whitehead Institute, and director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard who has devoted his career toward realizing the promise of the human genome for medicine...
,
Richard FeynmanRichard Phillips Feynman was an American physicist known for the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics and the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as work in particle physics...
, Richard Fishman, Mirza Mehdi,
Alan HarshmanAlan Harshman is a computer software engineer specializing in high-performance computing , artificial intelligence and data mining applications. He has worked on various computer ventures including supercomputer manufacturer Thinking Machines and Torrent Systems...
,
Richard JordanRichard Anson Jordan was a Harvard-educated American stage, screen and film actor. He was a long-time member of the New York Shakespeare Festival, and appeared in many Off Broadway and Broadway plays...
, Alan Mercer, James Bailey,
Tsutomu Shimomurais a Japanese scientist and computer security expert based in the United States, who became an instant celebrity when he, together with computer journalist John Markoff, tracked down and helped the FBI arrest hacker Kevin Mitnick....
http://www.takedown.com/bio/tsutomu.html and
Jack SchwartzJacob T. "Jack" Schwartz was an American mathematician, computer scientist, and professor of computer science at the New York University Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. He was the designer of the SETL programming language and the NYU Ultracomputer...
.
DARPA's Connection Machines were decommissioned by 1996.
http://www.cisl.ucar.edu/computers/gallery/index.jsp
External links