The Connection Machine model CM-1 architecture

An examination is presented of the performance of the Connection Machine model CM-1 system, a general-purpose computer capable of adapting to many sizes and types of data sets. An overview of the hardware and software systems is provided and a simple application is presented from which the raw performance of the machine is examined. This illustrates the power of data-level parallelism and indicates how CM-1 performance is enhanced by the use of virtual processors and variable word size. The CM-1 system consists of a 64000 processor array, from one to four front-end computers, and high-speed peripherals such as disks and image devices. >