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.

Neat...

[jetsci]

So, that's neat and all but did I misunderstand something. His model doesn't seem that powerful unless he was using modern processors?

pity the programmers weren't up to it

[Anonymous Coward]

Still not.

 

Re:Call me...

[serviscope_minor]

Who the hell modded the parent insightful? To the parent: call me when you ever do anything except post here.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

many 1980s boutique supercomputers

[peter303]

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.

Re:And the point is

[Noodles]

And I could buy a chair from WalMart, but I get more satisfaction out of building one.

Re:And the point is

[CompMD]

With that attitude and week-old UID, its no wonder America is suffering in science and engineering.

Re:Neat...

[yttrstein]

"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."

I'd be very interested to hear your opinions of these monsters after you've actually attempted to convert one into a real hardware emulator.

Something tells me if you're really serious about doing it in Java though, I'll be waiting a bit more than "about a day".