jason@madnix.UUCP (Jason Blochowiak) (03/07/90)
In article <13715@fs2.NISC.SRI.COM> cwilson@NISC.SRI.COM (Chan Wilson) writes: > [Entire discussion of ROM 04 upgrade, etc., nuked] >So you'll end up with two computers. Well heck, there's your multitasking. >I do it all the time -- run a telcomm program on my //e, downloading files, >while doing other things on my GS. >'course, I haven't quite figured out what to do with the //c+, the other >//e, and the 2 ][+s in the closet.... howbout parallel processing? ;-) That may not be as much of a joke as you think... I'm working on the lower layers of a serial-based network to facilitate distributed parallel processing with a mixture of PC's (some Compaq's, some Atari ST's, and a Pixel [old 68000 based Unix machine]). Although this thing isn't going to rival a Connection Machine (at least not seriously ;), it will allow existing processing power (in small increments) to be fully utilized. I'm not at liberty to discuss the details, but it's going to be one mighty interesting system... Btw, although there weren't any //'s in the lineup (yaknow, working with what hardware is already there, that type of thing), there's no reason that they couldn't do loosely coupled parallel processing. In my case, I couldn't include anything less than a //gs in the lineup (and it'd be questionable) because the base software is in C - forget the rest (stuff written in Prolog, some using DBase) of the layers. But, since your hardware is fairly homogenous, you could do custom assembly stuff... >--Chan > Chan Wilson -- cwilson@nisc.sri.com <or> radius!cwilson@apple.com -- Jason Blochowiak - jason@madnix.UUCP or, try: astroatc!nicmad!madnix!jason@spool.cs.wisc.edu "Education, like neurosis, begins at home." - Milton R. Saperstein
cs122aw@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (Scott Alfter) (03/08/90)
Just think: if I'm right, the Connection Machine uses 65536 8-bit processors.
I'm not about to suggest that you hook up 65536 Apple IIs :-) , but why not
hook up all those IIs in the closet? You might even whip up a dirt-cheap
connection utilizing the 16-pin DIP game ports, but that would lock out the
IIc and IIc Plus. (Yeah, you could connect the annunciator outputs from one
II to the button inputs of the next II to set up a ring of computers, and write
drivers to set up a type of round-robin communications. Too much overhead?
Instead, have one machine (your GS, probably) connect (through TTL buffers,
of course, to prevent burnout!) to all of the other machines in the network;
it can then call only one computer to the side. A couple of dollars for some
simple logic on a board and a connection somewhere to generate interrupts, and
you have the world's cheapest LAN! Don't know how it would do for speed,
though--it would depend on the speed of the machines in the network. Put a
TWGS or 10 MHz RocketChip in every machine, and you could probably get some
pretty decent speed!)
Talk about digression! Anyway, you could distribute the workload of your
programs more easily this way--make a file server/disk cache, a print spooler,
and do all sorts of other neat things. Who knows what you could come up with?
Scott Alfter-------------------------------------------------------------------
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