Abstract
The field of scalable computing is being redefined by the emergence of low cost parallel servers based on standard commodity microprocessors and off-the-shelf networking technologies. Many high performance applications will, in future, be carried out on such systems. Other applications, with very demanding communications requirements, will continue to be run on more specialised and expensive supercomputer systems. Over the next few years we will see the growth of a large and diverse global parallel software industry similar to that which currently exists for sequential computing. The main goal of that industry will be to produce scalable programs which, in addition to being fully portable, will offer high performance, in a predictable way, on any general purpose parallel architecture. The BSP model provides a discipline for the design of universal programs of this kind.
This work was supported in part by ESPRIT Basic Research Project 9072 — GEPPCOM (Foundations of General Purpose Parallel Computing).
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© 1996 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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McColl, W.F. (1996). Universal computing. In: Bougé, L., Fraigniaud, P., Mignotte, A., Robert, Y. (eds) Euro-Par'96 Parallel Processing. Euro-Par 1996. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1123. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-61626-8_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-61626-8_3
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