🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Aug12.171629.2858@nas.nasa.gov> fineberg@nas.nasa.gov writes:
>What I found amusing in Bell's article was the claims that KSR had proven
>that its architecture was scalable to 1088 nodes.  At a talk I heard they
>had never tried constructing a machine with more than 128 nodes, and have
>little experinece with machines larger than 64 nodes.  Thats a long way
>from 1088.  It reminds me of the claims TMC has made about the CM5's 
>scalability to 16K nodes.

A similar early claim was made for the CMU Cm* as being capable of having
almost 16K processors (50 were made, just a matter of how much you wanted
to spend).  You can tell how many bits were used for processor
addressing using this number (right?).  That's "Design" and "Engineering."
"Proving" you can build it is "Manufacturing." 8^)

Steve Lundstrom over at Stanford believes that unless you build to the maximum
designed size then sell off the pieces, you won't discover all the problems
(i.e. physical world) inherent in a design.  Other "weird" [typically not
powers of 2] numbers have their reasons in the world (the PEPE had a weird
number, the Delta has a non-2^n number); you can only ask why and hear their
explanation.

--eugene miya, NASA Ames Research Center, eugene@orville.nas.nasa.gov
  Resident Cynic, Rock of Ages Home for Retired Hackers
  {uunet,mailrus,other gateways}!ames!eugene
Second Favorite email message: Returned mail: Cannot send message for 3 days
A Ref: Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning, vol. 1, G. Polya