MasPar, anyone?

Qstieee(a)aol.com said: MasPar was a company out of Milpitas, CA founded (I understand) by ex-DECcies. They built a SIMD massively parallel machine. The unit was controlled by a front-end computer, originally a VAXstation 3520 running Ultrix, later some flavor of DECstation 5000 also running Ultrix. They used the VAXstation 3520 because they got a real good deal on them between the 3520 and the MasPar which, AFAIK, was the only 3rd party interface done for the 3520's proprietary MBUS. They claimed to have licked the problem of compiling for and debugging SIMD machines using standard languages; IIRC they supported FORTRAN and C. Seems to me they were more proud of their debugger than their compilers. I debugged the front-end interface hardware by poking hand-assembled code into the console using CP/M KERMIT's TRANSMIT command on my (then) trusty Kaypro 10. When I arrived with the prototype and my Kaypro, they said "How quaint; he hand-assembles code". After a while it was "Wow! Scope loops you can see on a scope!" (they were using a high-level interpreted thingy called hdb for hardware debugging; their scope loops were too slow to see on a scope) By the time I left, it was "show us how you did that." Sometimes being an old fart pays off. -- Roger Ivie ivie(a)cc.usu.edu