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Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine (1989)

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Re: Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine (1989)

#3
Heh, this reminds me of my time at Avici Systems: they made a 3d toroidal mesh-based "Terabit Switch Router" using wormhole routing with virtual channels to avoid head of line blocking (Bill Dally was associated with the company..). The company went public and provided the core routers for AT&T for a number of years. (Superseded by Cisco's HFR (Huge F*ing Router..).

The questions involved how much can you get away with (before deadlock) if you don't have enough virtual channels. Also is it ever worth extra buffering outside of the VCs. Also, how to get more bandwidth if one VC does not provide enough. The TSR used source routing (a list of turns on the head flit I think..), so how do you compute the routing list for arbitrarily incomplete meshes?

It's interesting that Feynman was involved in this field of interconnection networks, although for actual papers I do find his son's writing on the CM-5.

Re: Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine (1989)

#6
post #5

"It was amateurs who made the progress" This is a great way to explain why the term irritates me so much. Sometimes knowing nothing is a good thing.

An amateur isn't really someone who knows nothing about a particular subject. On the contrary, every amateur by definition knows at least something about their subject matter. An amateur is simply someone who engages that subject in a non-paid capacity, for personal enjoyment or some other reason. Indeed, amateurs can be, and many are, subject matter experts.

Re: Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine (1989)

#9
post #8

It's too bad feynman didn't teach him how to tell a story.

Feynman didn't have to. That was a very good story that was told very well. I now have a low opinion of you.

Feynman would have got my joke. And I disagree about the quality of the story. If it was interesting it wouldn't be on tedx

My heart is broken that you think less of me <//3

Re: Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine (1989)

#10
"One way to do this calculation is to use a discrete four-dimensional lattice to model a section of space-time. Finding the solution involves adding up the contributions of all of the possible configurations of certain matrices on the links of the lattice, or at least some large representative sample."

Did anyone see where I put my sandwich?

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