CM-200
Connection Machine 

THE CM-200 WAS THE FIRST CONNECTION MACHINE SYSTEM TO BE INSTALLED IN THE UNITED KINGDOM.

Launched as the UK's national supercomputing service in February 1992, the CM-200 was the most powerful – and most high-profile – computing facility available in the country. 

In its first year of service, the CM-200 had over 100 active users, with a monthly utilisation constantly in excess of 80%, making it probably the most heavily-used general-purpose Connection Machines system in the world at the time. 

Even the entry into service of the Cray T3D in July 1994 had little impact on the usage of the CM-200, which continued to attain a monthly processor utilisation in excess of 90%, with no significant change in either the size or profile of the user population.

EPCC's training programme manager David Henty was a post-doc in Particle Physics at this time and a heavy user of the CM-200. He recollects that this machine saw a significant improvement in the ability to write parallel code:

"I remember writing my first piece of code that achieved more than 1 Gflop performance. You just wrote clean Fortran with a few directives and the CM Fortran compiler parallelized everything for you."

SINCE ITS EARLY DAYS, EPCC HAS WORKED WITH SCOTTISH ENTERPRISE TO BRING THE BENEFITS OF HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING TO SCOTTISH BUSINESSES, AND THE FIRST INITIATIVE, STARTING IN 1992, CENTRED ON THE THINKING MACHINES CM-200.

The arrival of the CM-200 coincided with The Department of Trade & Industry and The Science & Engineering Research Council awarding EPCC £3.5 million to leverage industry projects.

This compelled EPCC to develop a highly-structured industrial programme, as well as providing funding for the Centre to grow very rapidly. The combination of this award along with the procurement of the CM-200 machine, both in just the second year of the Centre's existence, led to EPCC defining its highly successful strategy of working with academia, industrial end-users, and computer manufacturers for mutual benefit.

This programme exceeded its business targets, led to the initiation of new commercial projects, and helped to publicise the benefits of HPC.

Researchers from many fields used the CM-200 for a wide variety of projects 

Traffic Simulation: One outstanding success was the PARAMICS (PARAllel MICroscopic Traffic Simulator) project, which aimed to convert and upsize an existing microscopic simulator developed by Edinburgh-based traffic consultancy SIAS Ltd.

Conventional computer traffic simulations at the time used aggregated flows, modelling traffic movement rather like fluid in a pipe, using pockets or "platoons" of vehicles, but such models could not provide an accurate picture of congestion. Microsopic traffic modelling, in which individual vehicles are modelled in some detail, can simulate congestion accurately, but until the PARAMICS project the computational cost of doing this had been prohibitive, and simulations had been restricted to a few streets and a few hundred vehicles. 

The target of this project was to simulate real traffic flow and congestion problems on the complete trunk road system in Scotland, a network of approximately 8000 links and 3000 major junctions. The resulting data-parallel implementation, believed to be the most powerful traffic simulator of its type in the world at the time, could model peak demand on the network – around 200,000 vehicles on around 7,000 roads (taken from real road traffic network data) – at speeds of approximately twice real-time.

 The benefits of congestion modeling are vast, giving opportunities for improved road layouts and better pollution simulations. The success of PARAMICS was recognized when it won the 1994 Scotttish Strategic IT Award for Technology Transfer and was nominated for a 1995 Smithsonian Computerworld Award.

In June 1993, the CM-200 was ranked 88th in the Top 500 list. From July 1994, it ran alongside the new national service offered on the Cray T3D. Nearly 4 years after it was installed, in June 1995, it still ranked within the Top 500 (at number 371).