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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.
So, that's neat and all but did I misunderstand something. His model doesn't seem that powerful unless he was using modern processors?
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...when he's emulated a Connection Machine.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
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.
http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:r2RU-elaMN4J:chrisfenton.com/non-von-1/+non-von1&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us
I'm perfect in every way, except for my humility.
Folks just don't understand what FPGA's do.
"So, that's neat and all but did I misunderstand something. His model doesn't seem that powerful unless he was using modern processors?"
It's implemented in HARDWARE. Everything runs in parallel. To do the same on a "modern" processor, would require 300-400Mhz. A FPGA running at a [modest] 25Mhz could get the same or better performance.
"I can't help but wonder if this couldn't be emulated for a fraction of the price. Are there any virtualization systems out there that could accomplish what this guy did? I imagine something along the lines of GNS3 might work..."
FPGA's are cheap. A Spartan-3 board can be had for 100-200, and probably hold 2-3 32 node cpu's.
Programmers just don't understand the difference between say verilog, and C/C++/Java.
verilog is the basic building block of CPU's. Everything is done in PARALLEL by default, while in C++/Java everything is done SERIALLY.
I managed to catch this one before the site went down.
Cool stuff. The author says that these were originally designed to have each processor operate on a record in a database. All concurrently.
I imagine the speed of such a system would be staggering... though tough to implement for large data sets. Still pretty cool.
The Python library apparently implements machine code functions so he can debug in real time from the command line. Not my cup of tea, but cool for people that like to fiddle with machine code.
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.
The transputer was a RISC-ish CPU with 4 high speed DMA/serial links allowing it to be easily connected to other Transputers (each with its own local memory) to form a network. As such, it could be used to build a large MIMD system - not a SIMD one.
Transputers (+ the Occam language) supported multi-threaded programming with very fast context switches and, for its time, they also had very good FP performance when compared to the contemporary x86+float coprocessor.
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).
I'm not imagining anything. I'm KNOWING you're the kind of asshole who posts on every Slashdot article about someone's homebrew project whining that it isn't "useful" in some arbitrary utilitarian sense and therefore is pointless. I'm knowing you do this, because like the others you have no imagination, no desire to learn, and no empathy with those who do.
Oh, and it was you who raised Linux, in what appeared to be some kind of ironic "You're criticizing me, but I run Linux! Linux I tell you! Therefore I am cool!" defense against the suggestion you might actually be a wannabe geek. You do know that Linux wasn't utilitarian once too, right?
No, you're not cool. You're an ass.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
One of my classmates was a Masspar founder. In the 1980s it readily doable for a 2 to 5 person team to design a custom CPU with the new Mead-Conway type circuit compilers and Silicon-fab factories out there. Lots of clever ideas too. Plus UNIX (before Linux) was a low cost way of porting an operating system that customer scientists were familar with. They all claimed C-compilers that made porting code easy. NOT! I put energy industry code on a half-dozen of them.
The problems was the second generation machine. The prototypes got out the door, but only found a handful of customers - usually bold geeks. The second generation CMs, MassPars, Convexes, etc. then took 3-5 years. In the meantime that was about 3 to 5 Intel commodity chip generations which caught up in the meantime.
The 1990s were expandable commodity clusters. Several of my friends started software services companies in their garages with a few dozen nodes, then expanded as business grew. Several cashed out very well. The 1990s approach made economic sense, but the 1980s were more intellectually interesting.
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.
And I could buy a chair from WalMart, but I get more satisfaction out of building one.
With that attitude and week-old UID, its no wonder America is suffering in science and engineering.