jbn@glacier.STANFORD.EDU (John B. Nagle) (02/25/88)
... Adding more and more parallel processors turns a computer into
a new kind of animal, a thinking machine. Developers of thinking machines
now are talking in terms not of 64 processors, but 64,000 interlinked
processors. The linkages, not the processors, become the central part
of the technology. Cray sees too much potential in its existing business
to consider, at this point, going into the thinking machine business.
"It's kind of like we make left brains. Even though they are getting
more complex, it's still rational, linear, deterministic programs that we
run. They [the thinking machine people] are trying to build the right
brain, where the interconnections are as much of the machine as the
processors. What you are going to do is just get them started and they're
going to go off on their own and it will be fascinating to see how this works.
But I think we're really talking about decades."
(John A Rollwagen, chairman of the board of Cray Research,
quoted in an article by George Melloan, in The Wall Street Journal of
February 23, p. 29.)