Highly Parallel Systems: Where Are We?
- Performance:
- Sustained performance has dramatically increased during the last year.
- On most applications, sustained performance per dollar now exceeds that of
conventional supercomputers.
- BUT...
Conventional systems are still faster on some applications.
- Language and compilers:
- Standardized, portable, high-level languages such as HPF, PVM, and
MPI are available.
- BUT...
Initial HPF releases are not very efficient.
-
... Message passing programming is tedious and hard to debug.
- ... Programming difficulty remains a major obstacle to usage by mainstream
scientists.
http://www.netlib.org/utk/people/JackDongarra/