NPAC Technical Report SCCS-134
The Architecture of Problems and Portable Parallel Software Systems
Geoffrey Fox
Submitted July 1 1991
Abstract
We show how the structure or architecture of applications suggest the nature of parallel software
systems that will run portably on a variety of parallel machines - both those available now and
those expected during the coming decade. The discussion is illustrated by lessons learned from real
applications implemented on current MIMD and SIMD machines. These are mainly academic
problems and the extrapolation to complex industrial and government applications is unproven but
we believe our methodology will still be applicable. We suggest that problems consist of a
heterogeneous mixture of at least three distinct classes for which the parallel software support
could be different. Further, we need approaches to manage the integration of these different
software paradigms.