NPAC Technical Report SCCS-265
Prospects for Parallel Computing
Geoffrey Fox
Submitted June 01 1992
Abstract
We describe the state of parallel computing in 1992. The technological
driving force is the increasing performance of VLSI chips. This leads
to nodes which can be joined together in several different
architectures to provide powerful machines leading to teraflop
performance in 1996 and petaflops 20 years later. This is put in the
context of the federal HPCC initiative. We describe the analogies with
society and discuss illustrative examples with a chemical flavor.
Simple examples of SIMD, MIMD and vector supercomputers are
contrasted. On the software side, parallel operating systems and both
data parallel and message passing programming environments are briefly
reviewed. The types of applications -- Grand Challenges from academia
and industry -- expected to benefit from HPCC are noted.