What is Parallel Architecture?
A parallel computer is any old collection of processing elements that cooperate to solve large problems fast
- from a pile of PC’s to a shared memory multiprocessor
Some broad issues:
- Resource Allocation:
- how large a collection?
- how powerful are the elements?
- how much memory?
- Data access, Communication and Synchronization
- how do the elements cooperate and communicate?
- how are data transmitted between processors?
- what are the abstractions and primitives for cooperation?
- Performance and Scalability
- how does it all translate into performance?
- how does it scale?