26 (Материалы к экзамену)

Newsgroups: comp.parallel,comp.sys.super

From: eugene@sally.nas.nasa.gov (Eugene N. Miya)

Reply-To: eugene@george.arc.nasa.gov (Eugene N. Miya)

Subject: [l/m xx/xx/xx] Dead Comp. Arch. Societyc.par/c.s.super (26/28) FAQ

Organization: NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA

Date: 26 May 1998 12:03:05 GMT

Message-ID: <6keb1p$1sj$1@sun500.nas.nasa.gov>

Archive-Name: superpar-faq

Last-modified: 30 Apr 1998

26Dead computer architecture society< * This Panel * >

27Special call

28Dedications

2Introduction and Table of Contents and justification

4Comp.parallel news group history

6parlib

8comp.parallel group dynamics

10Related news groups, archives and references

12

14

16

18Supercomputing and Crayisms

20IBM and Amdahl

22Grand challenges and HPCC

24Suggested (required) readings

This space intentionally left blank (temporarily).

UNDERDEVELOPMENT

This is a roughly chronological list of past supercomputer, parallel computer,

or especially "interesting" architectures, not paper designs (See panel 14,

for references for those). Computer archeology is important

(not merely interesting), because it is the failed projects where real

learning takes place. Even Seymour Cray designed "failed" machines.

DCAS came from a so-so Robin Williams movie: Dead Poets Society (DPS)

which nerd CS students went to see (trust me, he's better in live performance).

In turn, the dead-architecture, lessons-learned discussion started in

comp.arch later that same year. The idea was to collect material from

knowledgeable ex-engineers and former scientists, anonymously if need be,

before it was lost (since the company had either died or evolved).

The problem is that academic and commercial literature is fraught with

all kinds of useless glowing marketing/sales language. We (the net,

I didn't do this alone) collected comments anonymously (if need be)

to prevent lessons being lost. The idea was that anyone could comment.

It was that netters had hashed over this material before so many times,

it seemed useful to capture it (like an FAQ ;^). We assembled a

list of architectures.

Maybe, a third the way through the list, I was asked by certain people

with CRI to suspend discussion, because CRI was starting to acquire

Supertek (which I personally always thought was a mistake).

We never resumed. We lost the inertia.

Ever hear of the Gibbs Project?

If not: you should not be surprised.

Around that same time, ASPLOS came to Santa Clara, where they held a

Dead Computer Architecture Society panel session. I had a meeting of

some sort (possibly SIGGRAPH) and I missed the starting hour.

I gave Peter Capek of IBM TJW a video camera, but I did not keep the tape

because I merely wanted to see what I had missed

(if I had, I would have given it to J. Fisher who sat on the panel).

I did not regard that as recording history.

The panel session discussed the various failed minisupercomputer firms

(perhaps I should use more flowery marketing language like

"attempted?"). Either way, lessons were there in front of 200+ architects,

OS and language designers. Perhaps there was another video camera

in the room.....

Let see what were the four architectures represented?

Elxsi

...

Multiflow

...

One poster has mentioned "Why no mention of the Symbolics 3600, LMI, or TI

LISP machines?" I am not adverse to including the lessons from those machines,

however, the DCAS discussion was about minisupercomputers. The 3600 and other

LISP machines fell more into the class of workstations during their time

competing with the Xerox "D-machines" [Dorado, Dolphin, and Dandelion],

SUN, SGI, VAXStation, etc. Most at the time were not even parallel machines.

But if you can pitch me a good case, I'll consider them. Do it.

Also useful:

old header files for those systems which ran C compilers.

Most recently, I am reminded of a warm fall Saturday morning in a house

on a hill overlooking the beautiful Santa Barbara Channel.

George Michael, who I drove just to see Glen Culler (who had suffered

a stroke some time back), was talking about "war stories,"

Ms. Culler [wife and David's mother] chimed in:

"I really think you need a better title for your book

{one GAM was working on}. No one will buy it with a word like

'war stories' in the title...."

Three of us in the room chuckled. She is great.

The Dead Computer Architecture Society

======================================

Floating Point Systems (FPS)

----------------------------

(Purchased by Cray Research)

FPS AP-series (Culler based design with VLIW attributes)

7600 performance attached to your PDP-11.

Roots with Culler-Harris (CHI), Inc. FPS started with specialized

attached processors FPS AP-120B, and scaled from there

to the FPS T-series Hypercubes. The AP-120 line could be attached

to machines as small as a PDP-11. They were controlled by specialized

Fortran (and later C) system calls (a software emulator existed for code

development: obviously slow). Known as an FFT and MXM box.

It was marketed in 1977 in Scientific American as 7600 power on

your minicomputer and showed quite respectable, but economical,

number crunching power (I/O was still a problem).

38-bit words. Pipelined, precursor to VLIW? Perhaps.

Later models: FPS-164, FPS-264, FPS-500, APP

Larger 64-bit attached processors. Pre-IEEE-FP. Attached processors

became useful and popular for signal processing, medical apps.

FPS T-series (hypercubes)

Someone else (maybe Stevenson) can write a T-series paragraph.

Absorbed by Cray Research.

This business unit sold by SGI to Sun at time of SGI/Cray merger, 7/96.

[Current living incarnation.] The former CS-6400 line:

Current living incarnation is the UltraEnterprise 10000 and UltraHPC 10000

(2 different names for 2 different markets, same box).

Denelcor

--------

The Denelcor Heterogeneous Element Processor (HEP) was perhaps the most

unusual architecture a student will never get a chance to see.

My first knowledge of this machine came from Mike Muuss (BRL, scheduled

to get one [4 PEMs delivered]) at a time when the DEC VAX-11/780 was the only

VAX around. Later I would invite representatives to Ames.

7600-class scalar CPUs at a time when the Cray-1 was out

and the X-MP was just being delivered. 64-bit machine.

1978-1984.

Full-Empty bits on the memory, goes way beyond mere Test-and-Set

instructions.

Separate physical Instruction (128MB) and Data (1 GB) Memory

based in Aurora, CO, East of Denver.

Operating systems: HEP-OS and HEP Unix.

Programming and architecture manuals at the Museum.

Keywords: dataflow (limited),

13 systems delivered. Photos.

Sites (Messina list, 13 sites):

BRL (only 4 PEMs)

Argonne

LANL

GIT

XXX (probably)

Luftansa

7 to go.

Problems: somewhat underpowered at the time, programming difficulties.

Hardware deadlock. Early inexperience with serious parallel systems.

Software. Ambitious. Pipelining. Dataflow.