In the 1990s, chipmaker Intel offered a standalone computer called the Paragon. Using Intel’s i860 chip, these so-called Crays on a chip were linked by the hundreds into a parallel processing system that offered vast computational power. One of the most notable features of the Paragon supercomputer was its large, decorative LED paneling on the front cabinet doors. These lights were purely a cosmetic feature of the machine. Each cabinet has four LED panels, each of which shows the status of 16 i860 nodes in a 4 × 4 grid. The following figures show the upper left corner of one LED panel. The meanings of the LEDs are as follows:
The square groups of horizontal LED bars show the amount of computational activity on the nodes. Each group represents one i860 node. The more active a node is, the more LEDs are illuminated, in a bar graph, the above figure shows the progression of activity from 0% to 100%. While in its day the i860 was powerful. The true power of the Paragon came from coordinating many such nodes. A message passing algorithm was used for this. Like the old children’s game of Telephone, data was passed between the nodes in these messages.
The arrow-shaped LEDs indicate messages. When a message is passed from one node to another, all the arrow LEDs along its path illuminate. Yellow arrows show messages going up or to the left; green arrows show messages going down or to the right. When the arrows are illuminated, a light pattern moves along the arrow to show the direction of motion.
The computational tasks shown running in these photos of the Paragon’s front panel displays are of the embarrassingly parallel variety. So-called because their very nature lends themselves to being embarrassingly easy to parallelize and results in near perfect 100% utilization of the underlying machine and near constant unblinking illumination of all of the LEDs.
The problems that I usually ran were not like this. The code that I used, solved linear algebra equations that were arranged into a matrix and then handed off to an external matrix solver for solution. The resulting lights display was truly something to behold. I remember many a morning coming into a darkened computer room, illuminated solely by the blinking-flashing of hundreds of LEDs as messages are passed from node to node. I can also remember entering a darkened computer room, not illuminated by flashing LEDs and seeing a seemingly dead computer, signifying that my program had died the night before.
That was the 1990s. The company had about half-a-dozen of these Paragons then and maintenance costs for them were $10M a year. In addition to their fancy light show, we also got a fulltime onsite Intel rep. Still, $10M was a lot of money and besides, Intel wanted to get out of this business. Enter the PC cluster. What we now call servers. At the time, the purchase price for these machines were less than a half million a pop. These calculations involving dollars were easy for management to grasp. They quickly bought into this idea. Fast forward to 2016 when I left the company. Then there were 50+ of these clusters in operation and by then they cost way more than half-a-million. A few years later, Boeing won the F-47 contract. The years of effort/dollars are paying off.