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Thinking Machines Corporation was a supercomputer manufacturer founded in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1983 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 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. ==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 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. The CM-2 required a Symbolics 3600 LISP machine as a front-end processor; later models used a Sun Microsystems workstation or VAX minicomputer. Thinking Machines also introduced an early commercial RAID2 disk array, the DataVault, circa 1988.〔US Patent 4,899,342, METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR OPERATING MULTI-UNIT ARRAY OF MEMORIES, filed : Feb 1, 1988〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Thinking Machines Corporation」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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