🚀 go-pugleaf

Organization : California Institute of Technology
Keywords: 
From: jon@oddhack.Caltech.Edu (Jon Leech)
Path: oddhack!jon

In article <1216@ogcvax.UUCP> pase@ogcvax.UUCP (Douglas M. Pase) writes:
>required, the iPSC is probably not appropriate.  Geoffrey Fox of CalTech
>presented a paper in one of the 1984 conferences extolling some of the virtues
>of a hypercube architecture (NOTE: NOT an iPSC - the iPSC is based on Fox's
>design) for computing.  

	This is a common misconception which I will attempt to correct.
The original Caltech Cosmic Cubes (sitting not 20 feet from me), were
put together by a team led by two professors - Fox & Chuck Seitz of CS -
and a number of students from both Physics & CS. The two hypercube groups
split up and have gone their separate ways since then, but please give credit
where it's due, to Seitz. Fox might like to think he did it all by himself, 
but that's not the case.

	I do generally agree with Eugene Miya's assessment of hypercubes,
though. I think it is a big mistake for people to attempt to do practical
work using machines which are still very much research projects themselves
(as I am finding in attempting to do my MS work on the cubes here). The 
biggest problems from my point of view are the terribly immature software 
environments (debugging? what's that?) and extremely slow communications
to the cube hosts.

    -- Jon Leech (jon@csvax.caltech.edu || ...seismo!cit-vax!jon)
    Caltech Computer Science Graphics Group
    __@/