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50-638: On the hardware side, Thinking Machines produced several Connection Machine models (in chronological order): the CM-1, CM-2, CM-200, CM-5, and 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 programming 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

100-532: A cam subtracts from (or adds to) the cam slider, which the adders move. Another advantage of the digital computer over the gear train is that it is more evolvable. For instance, the ratio of day to years depends on Earth's rotation, which is slowing at a noticeable but not very predictable rate. This could be enough to, for example, throw the phase of the Moon off by a few days over 10,000 years. The digital scheme allows that conversion ratio to be adjusted, without stopping

150-684: A fat tree network of reduced instruction set computing (RISC) SPARC processors. To make programming easier, it was made to simulate a SIMD design. The later CM-5E replaces the SPARC processors with faster SuperSPARCs. A CM-5 was the fastest computer in the world in 1993 according to the TOP500 list, running 1024 cores with Rpeak of 131.0 G FLOPS , and for several years many of the top 10 fastest computers were CM-5s. Connection Machines were noted for their striking visual design. The CM-1 and CM-2 design teams were led by Tamiko Thiel . The physical form of

200-692: A company gone bankrupt, the Super-Connector from Thinking Machines, Inc., of Cambridge, Massachusetts" in the NSA's basement. In addition, in The Bear and the Dragon says the National Security Agency could crack nearly any book or cipher with one of three custom operating systems designed for a Thinking Machines supercomputer. In the 2008 video game Fallout 3 , it is mentioned that the pre-war firm that made

250-414: A conventional gear train (which has been the standard mechanism for the past millennium) is that gears necessarily require a ratio relationship between the timing source and the display. The required accuracy of the ratio increases with the amount of time to be measured. (For instance, for a short period of time the count of 29.5 days per lunar month may suffice, but over 10,000 years the number 29.5305882

300-463: A few centuries. Many options were considered for the power source of the clock, but most were rejected due to their inability to meet the requirements. For example, nuclear power and solar power systems would violate the principles of transparency and longevity. In the end, Hillis decided to require regular human winding of a falling weight design for updating the clock face because the clock design already assumes regular human maintenance. However,

350-416: A founding board member of the foundation, "Such a clock, if sufficiently impressive and well-engineered, would embody deep time for people. It should be charismatic to visit, interesting to think about, and famous enough to become iconic in the public discourse. Ideally, it would do for thinking about time what the photographs of Earth from space have done for thinking about the environment. Such icons reframe

400-423: A mechanism whereby the power source generates only enough energy to keep track of time; if visitors want to see the time displayed, they would have to manually supply some energy themselves. Options considered for the part of the clock that converts time source (for example, a pendulum) to display units (for example, clock hands) include electronics , hydraulics , fluidics , and mechanics . A problem with using

450-648: A redundant array of independent disks ( RAID ) hard disk system, called a DataVault , of up to 25 GB. Two later variants of the CM-2 were also produced, the smaller CM-2a with either 4096 or 8192 single-bit processors, and the faster CM-200 . Due to its origins in AI research, the software for the CM-1/2/200 single-bit processor was influenced by the Lisp programming language and a version of Common Lisp , *Lisp (spoken: Star-Lisp ),

500-498: A side, divided equally into eight smaller cubes. Each subcube contains 16 printed circuit boards and a main processor called a sequencer. Each circuit board contains 32 chips. Each chip contains a router , 16 processors, and 16 RAMs. The CM-1 as a whole has a 12-dimensional hypercube -based routing network (connecting the 2 chips), a main RAM, and an input-output processor (a channel controller) . Each router contains five buffers to store

550-633: A team to develop what would become the CM-1 Connection Machine, a design for a massively parallel hypercube -based arrangement of thousands of microprocessors , springing from his PhD thesis work at MIT in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (1985). The dissertation won the ACM Distinguished Dissertation prize in 1985, and was presented as a monograph that overviewed the philosophy, architecture, and software for

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600-416: Is a much more accurate choice.) Achieving such precise ratios with gears is possible, but awkward; similarly, gears degrade over time in accuracy and efficiency due to the deleterious effects of friction . Instead, the clock uses binary digital logic, implemented mechanically in a sequence of stacked binary adders (or as their inventor, Hillis, calls them, serial bit-adders ). In effect, the conversion logic

650-434: Is a simple digital computer (more specifically, a digital differential analyser ), implemented with mechanical wheels and levers instead of typical electronics. The computer has 32 bits of accuracy, with each bit represented by a mechanical lever or pin that can be in one of two positions. This binary logic can only keep track of elapsed time, like a stopwatch; to convert from elapsed to local solar time (that is, time of day),

700-633: Is being built by the Long Now Foundation . A two-meter prototype is on display at the Science Museum in London. As of June 2018 , two more prototypes are on display at The Long Now Museum & Store at Fort Mason Center in San Francisco. The project was conceived by Danny Hillis in 1989. The first prototype of the clock began working on December 31, 1999, just in time to display the transition to

750-678: The Internet Archive and associated projects, including the Rosetta Project as part of Danny Hillis' Clock of the Long Now . Architect Greg Papadopoulos later became Sun Microsystems's chief technology officer (CTO). Many of the hardware people left for Sun Microsystems and went on to design the Sun Enterprise series of parallel computers. The Darwin data mining toolkit, developed by Thinking Machines' Business Supercomputer Group,

800-413: The hypercube -based array of them was designed to perform the same operation on multiple data points simultaneously, i.e., to execute tasks in single instruction, multiple data ( SIMD ) fashion. The CM-1, depending on the configuration, has as many as 65,536 individual processors, each extremely simple, processing one bit at a time. CM-1 and its successor CM-2 take the form of a cube 1.5 meters on

850-505: The zodiac . Around this will be a display showing the positions of the Sun and the Moon in the sky, as well as the phase and angle of the Moon. Outside this will be a double dial with digits, showing the year according to our current Gregorian calendar system. This will be a five-digit display, indicating the current year in a format like "02000" instead of the more usual "2000" (to avoid a Y10K problem ). Hillis and Brand plan, if they can, to add

900-405: The 25,765-year precession of Earth's axis . On the other hand, the clock is a product of our time, and it seems appropriate to pay homage to our current arbitrary systems of time measurement. In the end, it seemed best to display both the natural cycles and some of the current cultural cycles. The center of the clock will show a star field, indicating both the sidereal day and the precession of

950-409: The CM-1, CM-2, and CM-200 chassis was a cube-of-cubes, referencing the machine's internal 12-dimensional hypercube network, with the red light-emitting diodes (LEDs), by default indicating the processor status, visible through the doors of each cube. By default, when a processor is executing an instruction, its LED is on. In a SIMD program, the goal is to have as many processors as possible working

1000-538: The CM-2, and Meiko Scientific , whose CS-2 was similar to the CM-5. In 1991, DARPA and the United States Department of Energy reduced their purchases amid criticism they were unfairly favoring Thinking Machines at the expense of Cray , nCUBE , and MasPar . Tightening export laws also prevented the most powerful Connection Machines from being exported. By 1992, the company was losing money, and CEO Sheryl Handler

1050-488: The CM-5 design. A CM-5 was featured in the film Jurassic Park in the control room for the island (instead of a Cray X-MP supercomputer as in the novel). Two banks, one bank of 4 Units and a single off to the right of the set could be seen in the control room. The computer mainframes in Fallout 3 were inspired heavily by the CM-5. Cyberpunk 2077 features numerous CM-1/CM-2 style units in various portions of

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1100-486: The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency ( DARPA ). The next year, they sold $ 65 million (USD) worth of hardware and software, making them the market leader in parallel supercomputers. Thinking Machines' primary supercomputer competitor was Cray Research . Other parallel computing competitors included nCUBE , nearby Kendall Square Research , and MasPar , which made a computer similar to

1150-536: The Snake Range. The site's dryness, remoteness, and lack of economic value should protect the clock from corrosion, vandalism, and development. Hillis chose this area of Nevada in part because it is home to a number of dwarf bristlecone pines , which the Foundation notes are nearly 5,000 years old. The clock will be almost entirely underground, and only accessed by foot traffic from the east once complete. Before building

1200-459: The clock included: Most of these methods are inaccurate (the clock will slowly lose the correct time), but are reliable (that is, the clock will not suddenly stop working). Other methods are accurate but opaque (meaning that the clock is difficult to read or understand). Many of these methods are accurate (some external cycles are very uniform over huge stretches of time) but unreliable (the clock could stop working completely if it failed to track

1250-479: The clock is designed to keep time even when not being wound: "If there is no attention for long periods of time the Clock uses the energy captured by changes in the temperature between day and night on the mountain top above to power its time-keeping apparatus." The timing mechanism for such a long lasting clock needs to be reliable and robust as well as accurate. The options considered but rejected as sources of timing for

1300-428: The clock will actually receive continued care and maintenance for such a long time is debatable. Hillis chose the 10,000-year goal to be just within the limits of plausibility. There are technological artifacts, such as fragments of pots and baskets, from 10,000 years in the past, so there is some precedent for human artifacts surviving this long, although very few human artifacts have been continuously tended for more than

1350-492: The clock, if the length of the day changes in an unexpected way. The Long Now Foundation has purchased the top of Mount Washington near Ely, Nevada , which is surrounded by Great Basin National Park , for the permanent storage of the full-sized clock, once it is constructed. It will be housed in a series of rooms (the slowest mechanisms visible first) in the white limestone cliffs, approximately 10,000 feet (3,000 m) up

1400-497: The computer systems for Vaults is called Think Machine. Connection Machine The Connection Machine ( CM ) is a member of a series of massively parallel supercomputers sold by Thinking Machines Corporation . The idea for the Connection Machine grew out of doctoral research on alternatives to the traditional von Neumann architecture of computers by Danny Hillis at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in

1450-414: The data being transmitted when a clear channel is not available. The engineers had originally calculated that seven buffers per chip would be needed, but this made the chip slightly too large to build. Nobel Prize -winning physicist Richard Feynman had previously calculated that five buffers would be enough, using a differential equation involving the average number of 1 bits in an address. They resubmitted

1500-477: The design of the chip with only five buffers, and when they put the machine together, it worked fine. Each chip is connected to a switching device called a nexus. The CM-1 uses Feynman's algorithm for computing logarithms that he had developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory for the Manhattan Project . It is well suited to the CM-1, using as it did, only shifting and adding, with a small table shared by all

1550-462: The early 1980s. Starting with CM-1, the machines were intended originally for applications in artificial intelligence (AI) and symbolic processing, but later versions found greater success in the field of computational science . Danny Hillis and Sheryl Handler founded Thinking Machines Corporation (TMC) in Waltham, Massachusetts , in 1983, moving in 1984 to Cambridge, MA. At TMC, Hillis assembled

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1600-467: The early corporate fellows of Thinking Machines were Marvin Minsky , Douglas Lenat , Stephen Wolfram , Tomaso Poggio , Richard Feynman , and Jack Schwartz , later joined by Charles E. Leiserson , Alan Edelman , Eric Lander , and Lennart Johnsson . DARPA 's Connection Machines were decommissioned by 1996. In the 1993 film Jurassic Park , Connection Machines (non-functioning dummies) are visible in

1650-422: The external event properly). Others have separate difficulties. Hillis concluded that no single source of timing could meet the requirements. As a compromise the clock will use an accurate but unreliable timer to adjust an inaccurate but reliable timer, creating a phase-locked loop . In the current design, a slow mechanical oscillator, based on a torsional pendulum, keeps time inaccurately, but reliably. At noon,

1700-556: The final design of the clock in Nevada. The project is supported by the Long Now Foundation , which also supports a number of other very-long-term projects, including the Rosetta Project (to preserve the world's languages) and the Long Bet Project . Neal Stephenson 's 2008 novel Anathem was partly inspired by his involvement with the project, to which he contributed three pages of sketches and notes. The Long Now Foundation sells

1750-445: The first Connection Machine, including information on its data routing between central processing unit (CPU) nodes, its memory handling, and the programming language Lisp applied in the parallel machine. Very early concepts contemplated just over a million processors, each connected in a 20-dimensional hypercube, which was later scaled down. Each CM-1 microprocessor has its own 4  kilobits of random-access memory (RAM), and

1800-443: The game. The b-side to Clock DVA 's 1989 single "The Hacker" is titled "The Connection Machine" in reference to the CM-1. Clock of the Long Now 31°26′54″N 104°54′14″W  /  31.44841°N 104.90384°W  / 31.44841; -104.90384 The Clock of the Long Now , also called the 10,000-year clock , is a mechanical clock under construction that is designed to keep time for 10,000 years. It

1850-587: The light from the Sun, a timer that is accurate but (due to weather) unreliable, is concentrated on a segment of metal through a lens . The metal buckles and the buckling force resets the clock to noon. The combination can, in principle, provide both reliability and long-term accuracy. Many of the usual units displayed on clocks, such as hours and calendar dates, may have little meaning after 10,000 years. However, every human culture counts days, months (in some form), and years, all of which are based on lunar and solar cycles. There are also longer natural cycles, such as

1900-433: The parallel instruction set of the Connection Machine. The CM-1 through CM-200 were examples of single instruction, multiple data ( SIMD ) architecture, while the later CM-5 and CM-5E were multiple instruction, multiple data ( MIMD ) that combined commodity SPARC processors and proprietary vector processors in a fat tree computer network . All Connection Machine models required a serial front-end processor, which

1950-454: The park's control room, programmer Dennis Nedry mentions "eight Connection Machines" and a video about dinosaur cloning mentions "Thinking Machines supercomputers". In the 1996 film Mission Impossible , Luther Stickell asks Franz Krieger for "Thinking Machine laptops" to help hack into the CIA 's Langley supercomputer. Tom Clancy 's novel Rainbow Six speaks of the NSA's "star machine from

2000-557: The processors. Feynman also discovered that the CM-1 would compute the Feynman diagrams for quantum chromodynamics (QCD) calculations faster than an expensive special-purpose machine developed at Caltech. To improve its commercial viability, TMC launched the CM-2 in 1987, adding Weitek 3132 floating-point numeric coprocessors and more RAM to the system. Thirty-two of the original one-bit processors shared each numeric processor. The CM-2 can be configured with up to 512 MB of RAM, and

2050-484: The program at the same time – indicated by having all LEDs being steady on. Those unfamiliar with the use of the LEDs wanted to see the LEDs blink – or even spell out messages to visitors. The result is that finished programs often have superfluous operations to blink the LEDs. The CM-5, in plan view, had a staircase-like shape, and also had large panels of red blinking LEDs. Prominent sculptor-architect Maya Lin contributed to

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2100-495: The public clock in Nevada, the foundation is building a full-scale clock of similar design in a mountain of the Sierra Diablo range near Van Horn, Texas . The test drilling for the underground construction at this site was started in 2009. The site is on property owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos , who is also funding its construction. The lessons learned in the construction of this first full-scale 10,000-year clock will inform

2150-415: The way people think." I want to build a clock that ticks once a year. The century hand advances once every one hundred years, and the cuckoo comes out on the millennium. I want the cuckoo to come out every millennium for the next 10,000 years. If I hurry I should finish the clock in time to see the cuckoo come out for the first time. The basic design principles and requirements for the clock are: Whether

2200-451: The year 2000. At midnight on New Year's Eve, the date indicator changed from 01999 to 02000, and the chime struck twice. The manufacture and site construction of the first full-scale prototype clock is being funded by Jeff Bezos 's investment firm Bezos Expeditions , with $ 42 million, and is on land which Bezos owns in the Sierra Diablo mountains in Texas. In the words of Stewart Brand ,

2250-407: Was also acquired by Sun Microsystems . Thinking Machines continued as a pure data mining company until it was acquired in 1999 by Oracle Corporation . Oracle later acquired Sun Microsystems, thus re-uniting much of Thinking Machines' intellectual property. The program wide area information server (WAIS), developed at Thinking Machines by Brewster Kahle , would later be influential in starting

2300-428: Was forced out. In August 1994, Thinking Machines filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The hardware portion of the company was purchased by Sun Microsystems , and TMC re-emerged as a small software company specializing in parallel software tools for commodity clusters and data mining software for its installed base and former competitors' parallel supercomputers. In December 1996, the parallel software development section

2350-607: Was implemented on the CM-1. Other early languages included Karl Sims ' IK and Cliff Lasser's URDU. Much system utility software for the CM-1/2 was written in *Lisp. Many applications for the CM-2, however, were written in C* , a data-parallel superset of ANSI C . With the CM-5 , announced in 1991, TMC switched from the CM-2's hypercubic architecture of simple processors to a new and different multiple instruction, multiple data ( MIMD ) architecture based on

2400-481: Was in turn acquired by IBM . Besides Hillis, other noted people who worked for or with the company included Robert Millstein, Greg Papadopoulos , David Waltz , Guy L. Steele Jr. , Karl Sims , Brewster Kahle , Bradley Kuszmaul, Carl Feynman , Cliff Lasser, Marvin Denicoff, Alex Vasilevsky, Allan Torres, Richard Fishman , Mirza Mehdi, Alan Harshman, Richard Jordan, Alan Mercer, James Bailey, Tsutomu Shimomura . Among

2450-558: Was most often a Sun Microsystems workstation, but on early models could also be a Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) VAX minicomputer or Symbolics Lisp machine . Thinking Machines also introduced an early commercial redundant array of independent disks ( RAID ) 2 disk array, the DataVault , circa 1988. In May 1985, Thinking Machines became the third company to register a .com domain name (think.com). The company became profitable in 1989, in part because of its contracts from

2500-439: Was purchased by Oracle . Most of the team that built Darwin had already left for Dun & Bradstreet soon after Thinking Machines Corporation entered bankruptcy in 1994. Thinking Machines alumni (known as "Thunkos") helped create several parallel computing software start-ups, including Ab Initio Software ; and Applied Parallel Technologies, which was later renamed Torrent Systems and acquired by Ascential Software , which

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