Abstract
High performance computers have played key roles in many scientific and engineering advances over the past 40 years, and many more may be expected in the future. However, unless practical parallel systems can be produced in this decade, a performance crisis will arise by 2000 across the spectrum of systems from workstations to supercomputers. There is widespread confusion today about how best to proceed with future parallel systems because so many different approaches have been taken and the performance results have been so spotty. A fundamental flaw in our approach to parallel computing, as a nation, is the poor understanding we have obtained about delivered performance. This paper analyzes the situation and suggests fundamental changes that are necessary to achieve practical parallelism in this decade. A great deal of money is now being spent and more is planned, to advance the field, but money is not so much the problem as shortages of qualified people and a sharp focus for their work. Our national goals for the end of this decade must be the creation of an infrastructure for understanding performance, and its natural consequence, the development of practical parallel systems.
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Kuck, D.J. What do users of parallel computer systems really need?. Int J Parallel Prog 22, 99–127 (1994). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02577794
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02577794