Highly parallel computers: Perspectives

Abstract

Highly parallel machines represent a technology capable of providing superior performance for technical and commercial computing applications. By utilizing technical advances in microsystems, such as the high performance RISC processors, and high speed interconnect, together with progress in algorithms and compilers, massively parallel systems will exceed the limits of performance being approached by traditional vector supercomputers. Prototypes have been built at IBM Research over the past 10 years to test various approaches: YSE, the Yorktown Simulation Engine, was a high performance, special purpose machine for logic simulation. Today, descendants of this machine are in use at nearly every IBM Development Laboratory; the RP3, Research Parallel Processor Prototype, was an innovative shared-memory multi-processor of the multiple instruction multiple data (MIMD) type; GF11, is an enhanced single instruction multiple data (SIMD) machine that currently achieves the highest sustained performance on key applications; and Victor-V256, a distributed memory, fixed-grid interconnect MIMD machine with 256 processors. In this paper we present our views on the influence of personal computing and telecommunication technologies on parallel processing. We will describe where the architecture of future parallel computers is heading and identify several network and hardware design issues which affect parallel machine implementations. We will also describe some of the parallel machines recently built at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, and conclude by projecting the evolving use of parallel computing and the likely route parallel computing will take into the 21st century. © 1992.