Inevitability of Parallel Computing

• Application demands: Our insatiable need for computing cycles

  • Scientific computing: CFD, Biology, Chemistry, Physics, ...
  • General-purpose computing: Video, Graphics, CAD, Databases, TP...

• Technology Trends

  • Number of transistors on chip growing rapidly
  • Clock rates expected to go up only slowly

• Architecture Trends

  • Instruction-level parallelism(ILP) valuable but limited
  • Coarser-level parallelism, as in Multiprocessors, the most viable approach

• Economics

• Current trends:

  • Today’s microprocessors have multiprocessor(MP) support
  • Servers and workstations becoming MP: Sun, SGI, DEC, COMPAQ!...
  • Tomorrow’s microprocessors are multiprocessors

Previous slide

Next slide

Back to first slide

View graphic version