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Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine

posted by martyb on Monday December 17 2018, @09:14AM   Printer-friendly
from the Ancient-History dept.

hendrikboom writes:

I found an old memoir by someone who had worked with Richard Feynman way back in the 80's.

Those days seem to presage a lot of things that have become commercial hot topics these days -- highly parallel computers and neural nets.

One day in the spring of 1983, when I was having lunch with Richard Feynman, I mentioned to him that I was planning to start a company to build a parallel computer with a million processors. (I was at the time a graduate student at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab). His reaction was unequivocal: "That is positively the dopiest idea I ever heard." For Richard a crazy idea was an opportunity to prove it wrong—or prove it right. Either way, he was interested. By the end of lunch he had agreed to spend the summer working at the company.

In his last years, Feynman helped build an innovative computer. He had great fun with computers. Half the fun was explaining things to anyone who would listen.

I was alive those days; might I be as old as aristarchus?

-- hendrik

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  • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday December 18 2018, @02:21PM (1 child)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday December 18 2018, @02:21PM (#775828) Journal

    It was way back in the day. My memory could be failing. But I seem to recall that the dimension of the cube determined the number of processors, and maybe the interconnects as a result. But I would be happy to be corrected on that point if I misunderstood or misremember.

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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday December 18 2018, @02:47PM

    by FatPhil (863) <{pc-soylent} {at} {asdf.fi}> on Tuesday December 18 2018, @02:47PM (#775838) Homepage
    Back in they day we weren't that imaginitve, and organised everything as cubes, cylinders (which includes token ring as a height-1 cylinder), or tori, and higher-dimension equivalents and there was a very simple relation between number of nodes, diameter, and number of connections - put one number in, and you'll typically get all the other optimal numbers out. Topologies have got much a bit more high tech since then, and less geometrically simple topologies have been realised to have better average-case or worst-case metrics. However, if you look at the interconnect architectures of multicore chips in recent times (intel/amd, etc.), you'll see that they have been patenting the same dumb old shit that MasPar/MPP/CM had 3 decades ago. Which is crazy, as yield is much more important now than it was years ago (die sizes have grown way more than wafer sizes, so that wafer wastage is now more significant), and therefore they should be looking at shrinking dies and pushing more smarts into the interconnects.
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