Thinking Machines Corporation
| Private | |
| Successor | |
| Founded | May 1983 Waltham, Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Founder | W. Daniel "Danny" Hillis |
| Defunct | 1994 |
| Headquarters | Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Products | CM-1, CM-2, CM-200, CM-5, and CM-5E; DataVault |
Thinking Machines Corporation was a supercomputer manufacturer founded in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1983 by Sheryl Handler and W. Daniel "Danny" Hillis to turn Hillis's doctoral work at MIT on massively parallel computing architectures into a commercial product known as the Connection Machine. The company moved in 1984 from Waltham to Kendall Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, close to the MIT AI Lab and Thinking Machines' competitor Kendall Square Research. Other competitors included MasPar, which made a computer similar to the CM-2, and Meiko, whose CS-2 was similar to the CM-5. The company filed for bankruptcy in 1994; its hardware and parallel computing software divisions were eventually acquired by Sun Microsystems.
Thinking Machines produced a number of Connection Machine 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, the smaller 16K and 4K configurations. The Connection Machine was programmed in a variety of specialized languages, including *Lisp and CM Lisp (derived from Common Lisp), C* (derived by Thinking Machines from C), and CM FORTRAN. 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 SIMD architecture (Single Instruction Multiple Data), while the later CM-5 and CM-5E were MIMD (Multiple Instructions Multiple Data) that combined commodity SPARC processors and proprietary vector processors in a "fat tree" network.
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