The Front End

The CM-2 has no life of its own, but works in symbiosis with a front end, in our case a SUN-4 named oas. Since the front-end does all the scalar arithmetic, the model should be chosen with this in mind. While the CM-2 is a single task (per partition) machine, there is no such restriction on the front-end. I had never worked with a SUN before coming to the Connection Machine, so I had some learning to do on the X interface. For those not familiar, X-Windows is powerful but rather klugie in operation when compared, say with NeXTview or the MAC interface. I find myself using two features. While oas is grinding away at compilation and linking, I can be doing other work on hanauma in another window. Also, the cut-and-paste facilities in X are very useful, if a bit substandard in operation.