Thinking Machines

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is about the supercomputer manufacturer. For the race of sentient computers in the Dune universe, see Thinking Machines (Dune).

Thinking Machines Corporation was a supercomputer manufacturer founded in Waltham, Massachusetts in 1982 by W. Daniel "Danny" Hillis and Sheryl Handler to turn Hillis's doctoral work at MIT on massively parallel computing architectures into a commercial product called the Connection Machine. The company moved in 1984 from Waltham to Kendall Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, close to the MIT AI Lab and Thinking Machine's competitor Kendall Square Research. Besides Kendall Square Research, Thinking Machines' competitors included MasPar, which made a computer similar to the CM-2, and Meiko, whose later offerings were similar to the CM-5.

"We're building a machine that will be proud of us." – Thinking Machine's motto

1 Products
2 Business history
3 Dispersal
4 External links
5 See also

[edit] Products

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 Connection Machine was programmed in a variety of specialized languages, including *Lisp and CM Lisp (derived from Common Lisp), C* (derived from C), and CM FORTRAN (using a special compiler to translate standard Fortran code to the parallel instruction set of the machine). The CM-1 through CM-200 were examples of SIMD architecture (Single Instruction Multiple Data), while the CM-5 and CM-5E were MIMD (Multiple Instructions Multiple Data). Thinking Machines also introduced the first commercial RAID disk array, called the DataVault, in 1985.

[edit] Business history

Thinking Machines became profitable in 1989 thanks to its DARPA contracts, and in 1990 the company had $65 million (USD) in revenue, making it the market leader in parallel supercomputers. In 1991, DARPA reduced its purchases amid criticism it was unfairly subsidizing Thinking Machines at the expense of other vendors like Cray and IBM. By 1992 the company was losing money again, due to lack of business; CEO Sheryl Handler was forced out in the face of public criticism.

Thinking Machines filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in August 1994. 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 of 1996, the parallel software development business was acquired by Sun Microsystems, forming the basis of Sun's entry into High Performance Computing.

Thinking Machines continued as a pure data mining company until it was acquired in 1999 by Oracle Corporation.

[edit] Dispersal

Many of the hardware people left for Sun Microsystems and went on to design the Sun Enterprise series of parallel computers. The Darwin datamining toolkit, developed by Thinking Machines' Business Supercomputer Group, was purchased by Oracle. Most of the team that built Darwin left for Dun & Bradstreet soon after the company entered bankruptcy.

Thinking Machines alumni ("thunkos") were instrumental in forming several parallel computing software start-ups, including Ab Initio Software and Applied Parallel Technologies. Ab Initio is still an independent company; Applied Parallel Technologies, later renamed to Torrent Systems, was acquired by Ascential Software, which was in turn acquired by IBM.

Besides Danny Hillis, other noted people who worked for or with the company included Greg Papadopoulos, David Waltz, Guy L Steele, Jr., Karl Sims, Brewster Kahle, Bradley Kuszmaul, Charles E. Leiserson, Marvin Minsky, Carl Feynman, Cliff Lasser, Alex Vasilevsky, Doug Lenat, Stephen Wolfram, Eric Lander, Richard Feynman, Mirza Mehdi, James Bailey and Jack Schwartz.