by Cameron Hughes, Tracey Hughes
Parallel computing is not a new concept. Its been around for decades. Now the reality is here. Serial computing is dead? Well, that’s what was stated in an article in IEEE Computer Magazine. With every new language, new operating system, new architecture, we always say whatever came before is dead. Cameron and I don’t prescribe to killing off anything that has to do with application development. Use whatever approach is needed to solve the problem.

New technologies just allow for more tools to make solutions possible and/or more efficient. But as far as hardware, that is pretty much the case. Will there be CPU manufacturers making single-core CPUs? That’s dead. Hardware development marches on, no looking back.

Now we’re talking about millions of cores and peta-scale (1015) to exa-scale (1018) operations per second. Massive parallelism has a name — Extreme Scale Computing (ESC). Just like multicore that had to solve the issue of power consumption and data transfers that led to improvements in data bus transfers technology for example, Extreme Scale Computing has many challenges it must overcome in the next decade: energy and power consumption, and enabling concurrency and locality. Table 1 shows some of the challenges of ESC as expressed in the article written by Josep Torrella from the University of Illinois article that appeared in IEEE’s Computer Magazine — Architectures for Extreme-Scale Computing.

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