J–Machine

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The J–Machine (Jellybean-Machine) was a parallel computer designed by the MIT Concurrent VLSI Architecture group in conjunction with the Intel Corporation. The machine used "jellybean" parts—cheap and multitudinous commodity parts, each with a processor, memory, and a fast communication interface—and a novel network interface to implement fine grained parallel programs.[1]

History

The J-machine was project was started in 1988 based on work in Bill Dally's doctoral work at Caltech.

The philosophy of the work was "processors are cheap and memory is expensive," the J in the project's title standing for jellybean which are small cheap candies. In order to make use of large numbers of processors the machine featured a novel network interface using message passing.[2] This allowed a node to send a message to any other node within 2 microseconds.[3]

Three 1024-node J-machine systems have been built and are kept at MIT, Caltech and Argonne National Laboratory.[4]

External links

Notes

  1. ↑ Dally, William; Chang, Andrew; Chien, Andrew; Fiske, Stuart; Horwat, Waldemar; Keen, John; Lethin, Richard; Noakes, Michael et al. (1998). "The J-Machine: A Retrospective". Retrieved 2009-06-17 
  2. ↑ Dally, William J.; Towles, Brian (2004). Principles and practices of interconnection networks. Morgan Kaufmann. pp. 102–109. ISBN 0-12-200751-4. 
  3. ↑ Hord, R. Michael (1993). "12. The J-Machine: A fine-grain concurrent computer". Parallel supercomputing in MIMD architectures. CRC Press. pp. 225–236. ISBN 0-8493-4417-4. 
  4. ↑ "The Jellybean Machine". CVA Group, Stanford University. Retrieved 2009-06-17. 


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