Connection Machine

The Connection Machine series grew out of [Danny Hillis]'s research in the early 1980s at [MIT] on alternates to the traditional [von Neuman architecture] of computation. The CM-1, developed at MIT, was a "massively parallel" [hypercube] arrangement of thousands of very simple processors, each with their own RAM.

Hillis and Sheryl Handler founded Thinking Machines in [Waltham, Mass] and assembled a team to develop the CM-2, which depending on the configuration had as many as 64k processors. A later modification added [numeric co-processors] to the system, with some fixed number of the original simple processors sharing each numeric processor.

After the CM-2, Thinking Machines switched from a hypercube architecture of simple processors to a fat tree network of [RISC] processors ([Sun SPARCs]).