Machines From The Lunatic Fringe

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When Danny Hillis first appeared on the computer scene in the mid-1980s, it was easy to dismiss him -- and the odd-looking device he called the Connection Machine -- as part of the industry's lunatic fringe. The chipmunk-faced scientist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had achieved a certain local notoriety from tooling around the streets of Cambridge in a secondhand fire engine. As an undergraduate he invented a mechanical computer, made entirely out of Tinkertoys, that could play tick-tack-toe. And as a graduate student at MIT's famed Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, he spent much of his time worrying about things like how infants learn to recognize their mother's face.

Moreover, the concept behind the Connection Machine, a big black cube studded with red blinking lights, had the power and simplicity of an idea that is too good to be true. Most computers built over the previous 50 years had been designed to do one thing at a time; they funneled massive quantities of data through a single processor (the mathematical engine where the bulk of a computer's work takes place). Hillis proposed to break this computational logjam by replacing the single high-speed processor with large numbers of tiny computer chips that would attack the data in concert. The experts scoffed when Hillis argued that such "massively parallel" computers would soon move into the mainstream of computer science, surpassing in sheer speed and processing power even the famous supercomputers built by Cray Research.

The experts were wrong. Last week when Hillis introduced the Connection Machine's latest incarnation -- another sleek black box with red blinking lights -- most of his predictions had come true. Not only can the Connection Machine 5 lay claim to being the speediest computer in the world, having bettered the most powerful Crays on some problems by a factor of 100, but Hillis' company, Thinking Machines Corp., has become the leader in one of the industry's fastest-growing markets. The first seven customers for the CM-5, who paid from $1.5 million to as much as $25 million for models containing anywhere from 32 to 1,024 processors, include some of the world's premier computer users: the Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories; the Army High Performance Computing Research Center at the University of Minnesota; Syracuse University; the University of California, Berkeley; and the University of Wisconsin. Schlumberger, an oil-services company, ordered one to help interpret seismic data. American Express bought two for analyzing customer buying habits.