Trevor Flowers' Miniaturized Connection Machine Puts an Icon of Early Supercomputing on Your Desk
A hypercube-based supercomputer from the 1980s forms the inspiration for this desk accessory — which doubles as a clock.
Maker and vintage computing enthusiast Trevor Flowers has put together a miniaturized 3D-printed replica of the Connection Machine 2 — complete with its iconic matrices of flashing lights to mesmerize passersby.
"Before we had GPUs, before we had multiprocessor personal computers, and before we all settled for beige computer cases there was the Connection Machine 2, a massively parallel hypercube-based arrangement of thousands of microprocessors," Flowers writes by way of introduction to the device. "The original, with its many blinkenlights, was 1.5 meters [around five feet] across, and so this 1:10 scale version is 15 centimeters or a little less than 6 inches across."
The original Connection Machine, known as the CM-1, was launched in 1985 by Thinking Machines Corporation. Built around a hypercube-based 12-dimensional routing network connecting up to 65,536 individual processors, the massively-parallel machines were produced until 1994 when simpler supercomputers built by connecting off-the-shelf processor nodes and graphics accelerators together became commonplace.
Flowers' recreation doesn't, sadly, have 65,536 individual processors — or even one-tenth of that number, in keeping with the scale. What it does have is a 16×9 LED matrix on each of the four front panels, mimicking the diagnostic display of the real deal — and driven by an Adafruit QT Py S3 microcontroller and an IS31FL3731 Charlieplexing LED driver, capable of playing classic animations or turning the machine into a desk clock.
"With help from a couple of full sized Connection Machine owners," Flowers writes, "I've reproduced this wonderful machine down to the smallest details, including the custom vents that run between the main cubes."
This isn't the first time Flowers has created a compact desk accessory inspired by a classic piece of vintage computing. Last month the maker put together a Tandy-Radio Shack TRS-80 replica with a working display, powered by CircuitPython on an Adafruit QT Py S3 — giving the device considerably more computing power than its full-scale predecessor, despite the difference in size.
More information on the project is available on Flowers' store, where units were being sold for $325 — though, at the time of writing, stock had been depleted. Those interested in the software side of things can find the project's source code on Codeberg, under an unspecified license.