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Prototype Motherboard Clusters Self-Coordinating Modules

Posted by timothy on from the your-mother's-so-modular-she-broke-up-with-herself dept.

An anonymous reader writes "A group of hardware hackers has created a motherboard prototype that uses separate modules, each of which has its own processor, memory and storage. Each square cell in this design serves as a mini-motherboard and network node; the cells can allocate power and decide to accept or reject incoming transmissions and programs independently. Together, they form a networked cluster with significantly greater power than the individual modules. The design, called the Illuminato X Machina, is vastly different from the separate processor, memory and storage components that govern computers today."

2 of 115 comments (clear)

  1. Transputers, anyone? by PaulBu · · Score: 5, Informative

    Am I too old to remember them? And before that, there was Connection Machine...

    Also (yes, I clicked on TFA! :) ), planar (in graph theory terms) interconnect topology would seem a bit too simplistic for anything resembling efficient routing...

    Paul B.

    1. Re:Transputers, anyone? by dha · · Score: 5, Informative

      I'm part of the project that produced this board.

      I am definitely, yes, old enough to remember the Transputer. And I hacked artificial life models on the MasPar in the early 90's, which had an architecture in some ways similar to the Connection Machine.

      Although the IXM is indeed 'embarrassingly suitable' for assembly into planar grids, it certainly isn't restricted to that. With right angle headers, for example, it's easy to make shapes likes rings and cubes and so forth.

      When the global computational geometry of a machine is fixed at design time, before the ultimate task is known, routing can easily become a major problem. And general routing is hard. Maybe too hard.

      But part of exploring modular systems in the 'physical computation' space is trying to figure out ways to make the geometry of the particular computer you build better fit the behavior you're implementing, which can help ease the general purpose routing problem.

      And if one really gets into a corner, well, ribbon cable is cheap.