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if anyone is interested..I'm sure there are other people more qualified, but I did spend quite a bit of time working with Paris and the underlying microcode system CMIS. it really wouldn't be that huge of a project to undertake. (@gmail.com)

one FPGA cell looks a lot like a CM processor, but since it gets reprogrammed every cycle, idk that that direct mapping works. but something would.

an interesting question though is the point. CM software wasn't anything like 'normal' software...so it took some subs tantial work to port codes.

would anyone really use such a thing or it is just a curiosity?

a _really_ cool project would be implementing CM-LISP

edit: everything except the router that is. that would be a bit of trouble




@convolvatron Why do you say that implementing CM-LISP would be a really cool project?


unfortunately someone has managed to scrub all the PDFs off the internet.

CM-LISP to me is kind of the holy grail of implicit parallelism. its kind of a relational paradigm but organized around recursive distributed mappings.

the only way that I can think to compile it is to build something like a relational query optimizer. except (I'm pretty sure(?)) mappings are first-class objects and the distributions of the underlying sets are fully dynamic.

so that's already a lot to try to come to grips with, but in this case the target is SIMD. which would in theory permit fulfillment of the CM thesis - arbitrarily scalable general computers without the overhead of reactive consistency (cache coherency).

CM programming was actually not that bad - but you needed to lay everything out in 2^n cartesian meshes. CM-LISP is just a free-for-all in terms of domain organization. actually I do really want to find the pdf again because its a much nicer model than graph-ql

I kind of suspect that it can't be compiled effectively, but last time I checked I'm only like 0.05 Steeles. I don't _know_ that it would turn out to be as compelling a programming model as I think, but would love to find out.

edit: I did find some cm-lisp related material in Hillis's thesis at https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/14719/1852428...

[there is a strong implication in the thesis that layout was intended to be dynamically optimized - so maybe the compiler issue isn't as terrible as I think]


Thinking about it - the Tera MTA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray_MTA) would make a really nice platform for CMLISP.




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