Thinking Machines Connection Machine 2 – INTERIM COMPUTER MUSEUM

Thinking Machines Connection Machine 2 (CM-2)

Preservation of this artifact is made possible through a donation from the Amara Foundation.

Introduced: 1987
Manufacturer: Thinking Machines Corporation (Founded by Danny Hillis and Sheryl Handler)
Architecture: Massively parallel SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data)

Principal Designers & Contributors

Danny Hillis – Chief architect; conceived the Connection Machine as his MIT PhD project
Brewster Kahle – Lead engineer; Designed the CM to be capable of processing “Big Data”
Bill Dally – Designed the router and interconnection network architecture
Russell Taylor – Led system logic and VLSI implementation
Guy L. Steele Jr. – Led the development of StarLisp parallel programming environment
Tamiko Thiel – Lead industrial designer; created the iconic CM-2 enclosure
Howard Resnikoff – VP of Research; contributed to overall system strategy
Ted Bilodeau – Mechanical design engineer for system chassis and internal structure
Allen Hawthorne & Gordon Bruce – Industrial design consultants
Richard Feynman – Consulting physicist; advised on memory access and routing efficiency

Danny Hillis is a computer scientist, inventor, and entrepreneur best known as the visionary behind the Connection Machine, one of the earliest and most ambitious attempts at building a massively parallel computer. While completing his Ph.D. at MIT under Marvin Minsky, Hillis proposed an architecture that could harness tens of thousands of simple processors working in unison — an idea that led directly to the development of the CM-1 and CM-2 at Thinking Machines Corporation, which he co-founded in 1983. As the chief architect, Hillis guided both the hardware and software design, blending innovative networking strategies with a striking physical form. Beyond the Connection Machine, Hillis went on to make significant contributions in diverse fields, from data visualization at Walt Disney Imagineering to long-term thinking with the Long Now Foundation. His work continues to influence modern computing, particularly in the realms of parallelism and distributed systems.

The Connection Machine 2 (CM-2) was a groundbreaking parallel supercomputer developed by Thinking Machines Corporation. It extended the capabilities of its predecessor, the CM-1, by incorporating enhanced floating-point performance, more memory, and greater flexibility for scientific and artificial intelligence applications.

The CM-2 could support up to 65,536 one-bit processors, arranged in a hypercube interconnect. Each processor had 4 kilobits of RAM and could be paired with a Weitek 32-bit floating-point unit, dramatically increasing its usefulness for numerical computations.

Designed under the SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) model, the Connection Machine CM-2 executed the same instruction across thousands of processors simultaneously, making it ideal for applications in physics simulations, machine learning, and image processing. It relied on a Symbolics Lisp Machine as a front-end, using a custom parallel dialect of Lisp developed at Thinking Machines known as StarLisp, with development led by Guy L. Steele.

The CM-2 was deployed at elite institutions like Los Alamos National Laboratory, MIT, and NASA, and remains a landmark in the history of parallel computing and design.

Our CM-2 was built out with a single quadrant for which we have a complete card cage and backplane. Because of this we designed to build out programmable LED boards similar to how it was done for the https://moma.org and the https://mimmsmuseum.org CM-2s. Since the display was programmable with a few different styles including a somewhat authentic display, we created an exhibit called CMY2K which featured the CM-2 has a countdown clock to the 20th anniversary of Y2K. Additionally it was sync’ed with NIST WWV including time code audio.

A key figure in the development of the CM-1/CM-2’s visual presence was Tamiko Thiel, the product designer and lead artist responsible for the machine’s striking physical design. Her work gave the CM-2 its iconic appearance: a black cube with a glowing red interior, created by illuminating thousands of LEDs connected to the processors. These lights visually reflected the computer’s activity, turning the machine into a dynamic sculpture that merged computational function with aesthetic form. Thus it represented the power and mystery of parallel computation, helping to establish the Connection Machine not just as a tool of science but also as a symbol of the emergent intelligence from networks of simple units—a vision echoing both biological systems and futuristic machines.

A board from our CM-2

This Symbolics LISP Machine (to the right of the DECSYSTEM-2020 known as MIT-AI.ARPA) served as the front end to our CM-2. It is currently in restoration with a working FEP and a Fujitsu Eagle SMD disk drive which contains a StarLisp world.

The back of the Symbolics 3670 features a bulkhead for connections to peripherals, network, color video and the Thinking Machines H BUS interface for the Connection Machine.