ABSTRACT
In October 1991, Thinking Machines Corporation (TMC) introduced the Connection Machine model CM-5. A CM-5 system may contain hundreds or thousands of parallel processing nodes. The architecture of the CM-5 is optimized for data parallel processing of large, complex problems. Every control processor and parallel processing node in the CM-5 is connected to two scalable interprocessor communication networks, designed to give low latency combined with high bandwidth in any possible configuration a user may wish to apply to a problem. The CM-5 runs a UNIX-based operating system; it provides its own highspeed parallel file system and also allows full access to ordinary NFS file systems. It supports both high-performance parallel interface and VME interfaces, thus allowing connections to a wide range of computers and I/O devices, while using standard UNIX commands and programming techniques throughout. The Control Network provides tightly coupled communications services.
