15 Nov
2011
15 Nov
'11
2:12 p.m.
Ethan Dicks wrote:
Build the worlds slowest Beowulf Cluster?
Sridhar Ayengar wrote:
I have one that probably is a contender for that
title.
Two machines each with 68010 @10MHz.
Not even close.
Possibly Ciarcia's multiprocessor 8751 system for Mandelbrot set
computations, in the October/November/December 1988 Byte magazines. It
was awesomely slow.
In that timeframe I was using a single Motorola DSP56001 to do
Mandelbrot set computations, and it was *much* faster than an array of
8051s. Somewhere I still have a printed listing of the assembly code.
The loop for a single-precision iteration was five instructions. The
double-precision loop was a lot longer. Originally I did this with a
386 PC, but later hooked it up to a Macintosh, and Dave Platt added
plugin support to MandelZot so I could use it without writing an entire
custom Macintosh application.
I see that Tristan did used the DSP56001 with an Amiga host for
Mandelbrot set computations around 1990:
http://lorachnroll.blogspot.com/2010/03/old-hand-made-co-processor-for-my-a…