History: diverse and innovative organizational structures, often tied to novel programming models
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Rapidly maturing under strong technological constraints
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The "killer microprocessor" is ubiquitous
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Laptops and supercomputers are fundamentally similar!
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Technological trends cause diverse approaches to converge
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Technological trends make parallel computing inevitable
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Need to understand fundamental principles and design tradeoffs, not just taxonomies
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According to Culler fundamental are: Naming, Ordering, Replication, Communication performance
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According to Fox: match computer hardware software and problem
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