At 02:20 PM 5/23/2007, Larry Stewart wrote:
Peter St. John wrote:
Mostly I was thinking of TMC (famous for the animation in Jurassic
Park), 1982-1994, from MIT, mostly acquired by Sun; so something
from CalTech maybe predating that, or competing with it, would be
very interesting. I'll look, thanks.
My only artifacts are DOS 3.2 and SVr4 manuals :-)
Peter
The problem with hypercubes is that the number of NICs per node
grows with the machine size. Want to double your machine size?
Then add a NIC to every node you already have. The number of nics,
or links, or cables, grows O(NlogN) for N nodes. You get a machine
diameter which is log N, which is nice, but there are ways to do
that with a fixed number of NICs per node such as fat trees or the
Kautz/deBruijn family.
Which is why Intel went to the "8 port switch in each node" sort of
architecture with the iPSC/2. The iPSC/1 got icky with having to
keep adding ethernet cards into each node. The iPSC/2 went to a
packaging with each node on a single card, with two flavors of nodes,
depending on whether it had a numeric/vector coprocessor or not. You
could put 128 nodes in a single rack, as I recall.
(iPSC => intel Personal Super Computer)
TMC had, among other luminaries, Richard Feynman to help work out
the routing software.
-Larry
James Lux, P.E.
Spacecraft Radio Frequency Subsystems Group
Flight Communications Systems Section
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Mail Stop 161-213
4800 Oak Grove Drive
Pasadena CA 91109
tel: (818)354-2075
fax: (818)393-6875
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