Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!think!barmar
From: barmar@think.COM (Barry Margolin)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Cray architecture
Message-ID: <18616@think.UUCP>
Date: 29 Mar 88 16:16:53 GMT
References: <7762@alice.UUCP> <418@ole.UUCP> <3216@phri.UUCP> <1574@osiris.UUCP> <1461@ut-emx.UUCP>
Sender: usenet@think.UUCP
Reply-To: barmar@fafnir.think.com.UUCP (Barry Margolin)
Organization: Thinking Machines Corporation, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 19

In article <1461@ut-emx.UUCP> reeder@ut-emx.UUCP (William P. Reeder) writes:
>I have suggested to many sales reps that they need a bank of gee-whiz
>lights on the front which blink faster as the load goes up.  That way
>people who walk by our machine room and look through the big window
>could see something "impressive".

You'd appreciate the Connection Machine's exterior design, then.  The
entire face (about a 5x5-foot square) is an array of LEDs (2 faces
with 64 rows of 32 lights on a fully-configured machine).  It would be
nice if they weren't all the same color, but I think I've heard that
only red LEDs are inexpensive enough to put 4K of them on a machine.
The lights can either be controlled explicitly by a program, or they
can show the state of a set of processors.

Barry Margolin
Thinking Machines Corp.

barmar@think.com
uunet!think!barmar