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DIY 1980s "Non-Von" Supercomputer
Brietech writes "Ever wanted to own your own supercomputer? This guy recreated a 31-processor SIMD supercomputer from the early 1980s called the 'Non-Von 1' in an FPGA. It uses a 'Non-Von Neumann' architecture, and was intended for extremely fast database searches and artificial intelligence applications. Full-scale models were intended to have more than a million processors. It's a cool project for those interested in 'alternative' computer architectures, and yes, full source code (Verilog) is available, along with a python library to program it with." Hope the WIPO patent has expired.
FTFA:
What if I want to build my own?
Yay open-source! The code isnâ(TM)t exactly polished, but in the interest of promoting weird retro computer architectures, Iâ(TM)ve provided the python library I wrote for it and the verilog code for the Processing Elements. Wire together as many as youâ(TM)d like! Use it to catalog all of your WhiteSnake and Duran Duran tapes!
How the hell did he know about my music collection?
This is pretty cool. 32 core non-von computing architecture on an FPGA. This is more or less the ARM process... license the IP and put it in an ASIC, except this is free. I've often wondered what might be done with the millions of 30xx series FPGAs that are out there in the world. I could lay my hands on probably 40-50 free. If there were some way to do something like this with them, that would be awesome. I like hobby robotics so it's tempting even though they would not be very power efficient. Still, that's a lot of potential processing for free. Now I'm going to have to look for free/open source code for them.
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Wasn't the transputer an example of this architecture? I'm old enough to be able to say "Get off my lawn!" and remember when the transputer came out; it caused quite a stir.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Of course a modern computer can simulate a 1980's computer. It would probably take about a day to write a functional simulation in Java.
For that matter, it's not like this computer can do anything that a modern computer can't do in spite of the different architecture. It was designed to do certain things fast, but anything off the shelf today could run circles around these relics regardless of such optimization. (To GP's point -- since the article indicates that he was building to the functional design of the original, it's probably not powerful by today's standards. He may have used faster components than they had back then -- and he obviously used smaller components than they had back then -- but we're not looking at a modern billions-and-billions-of-transistors-on-a-chip optimized-in-ways-you-cannot-comprehend heat-sink-needing CPU.) So once you talk about "what can it do" at a useful level of abstraction, the answer is "nothing all that practical".
But that's not the point, is it? This kind of stuff is a hobby and a fascination to some people. I'm interested enough that I might write a software simulation of the machine, but not interested enough to build one. This guy was interested enough to build one.
It's not like stamp collectors are saving up for a big letter-writing campaign...
For several years I worked on a SIMD system called MasPar. The system had 8192 processors. It was installed in 1991 and it was not until about 1998 that conventional computers running Oracle could even come close to the performance for data warehouse applications. Sure, it's slow by today's standards, but I bet a modern version custom built would be an awesome code breaking and data analysis system.
BTW: the system was used to help with the human genome project and to search Medical Services Plan data by the Province of BC. It finally decommissioned in 2000 (or early 2001).
An architecture like this is useful for massively parallel algorithms. It could theoretically outperform modern desktop or server systems within that domain.
In fact, a rebuild of COLOSSUS was estimated to be 240 times slower than a modern desktop at decoding old German cryptographic signals. That might not sound that good, but if you run Moore's Law in reverse over 60 years, you should get a factor a lot higher than 240.
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I got a chance to use a Connection Machine (real, not emulated) in the late 1980s, just a couple of years out of college. It was an internal R&D project for a defense contractor, porting a computational fluid dynamics program I didn't understand from Cray vectorized Fortran to the CM's *Lisp. Fun stuff.
I even got a chance to visit Thinking Machines headquarters in Boston, and hear Danny Hillis speak. Here he was speaking to a room full of suits, dressed in jeans, sneakers, and a T-shirt. I remember thinking at the time that being able to do that was quite an indicator of success.
Yeah, yeah, I know...offtopic, overrated, etc. So mod me down if you must. (Or is that just reverse psychology on you moderators? Muhahaha!)
"Rub her feet." -- L.L.
LOL
4x slower is much better than 40x or 400x slower (see gcc vs Ruby), that's what I wanted to show. Where did I say that gcj was faster than gcc?