NPAC Technical Report SCCS-370b
Parallel Computers and Complex Systems
Geoffrey Fox, Paul Coddington
Submitted June 4 1994
Abstract
We present an overview of the state of the art and future trends in
high performance parallel and distributed computing, and discuss
techniques for using such computers in the simulation of
complex problems in computational science.
The use of high performance parallel computers can help improve our
understanding of complex systems, and the converse is also true -
we can apply techniques used for the study of complex systems to improve
our understanding of parallel computing.
We consider parallel computing as the mapping of one complex
system - typically a model of the world - into another complex
system - the parallel computer. We study static, dynamic, spatial and
temporal properties of both the complex systems and the map between
them. The result is a better understanding of which computer
architectures are good for which problems, and of software structure,
automatic partitioning of data, and the performance of parallel machines.