Why Study Architecture Today?

• History: diverse and innovative organizational structures, often tied to novel programming models

• Rapidly maturing under strong technological constraints

  • The “killer microprocessor” is ubiquitous
  • Laptops and supercomputers are fundamentally similar!
  • Technological trends cause diverse approaches to converge

• Technological trends make parallel computing inevitable

  • In the mainstream

• Need to understand fundamental principles and design tradeoffs, not just taxonomies

  • According to Culler fundamental are: Naming, Ordering, Replication, Communication performance
  • According to Fox: match computer hardware software and problem

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