Past, Present, Parallel

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xix

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Arthur Trew, Greg Wilson

   Pages 1-12

3. SIMD: Specialisation Equals Success

   • Arthur Trew, Greg Wilson

   Pages 13-53

4. Shared Memory Multiprocessors: The Evolutionary Approach

   • Arthur Trew, Greg Wilson

   Pages 55-124

5. Hypercubes: A Geometry that Works

   • Arthur Trew, Greg Wilson

   Pages 125-147

6. The Transputer and Its Offspring

   • Arthur Trew, Greg Wilson

   Pages 149-200

7. New Machines For New Niches

   • Arthur Trew, Greg Wilson

   Pages 201-237

8. Vector Supercomputers: It’s Never too Late to Parallelise

   • Arthur Trew, Greg Wilson

   Pages 239-260

9. The Giants: Biding Their Time

   • Arthur Trew, Greg Wilson

   Pages 261-290

10. Software: Efficiency vs.Portability?

    • Arthur Trew, Greg Wilson

    Pages 291-315

11. Machines Past

    • Arthur Trew, Greg Wilson

    Pages 317-351

12. Machines Future

    • Arthur Trew, Greg Wilson

    Pages 353-356

13. Back Matter

    Pages 357-392

    PDF

Past, Present, Parallel is a survey of the current state of the parallel processing industry. In the early 1980s, parallel computers were generally regarded as academic curiosities whose natural environment was the research laboratory. Today, parallelism is being used by every major computer manufacturer, although in very different ways, to produce increasingly powerful and cost-effec- tive machines. The first chapter introduces the basic concepts of parallel computing; the subsequent chapters cover different forms of parallelism, including descriptions of vector supercomputers, SIMD computers, shared memory multiprocessors, hypercubes, and transputer-based machines. Each section concentrates on a different manufacturer, detailing its history and company profile, the machines it currently produces, the software environments it supports, the market segment it is targetting, and its future plans. Supplementary chapters describe some of the companies which have been unsuccessful, and discuss a number of the common software systems which have been developed to make parallel computers more usable. The appendices describe the technologies which underpin parallelism. Past, Present, Parallel is an invaluable reference work, providing up-to-date material for commercial computer users and manufacturers, and for researchers and postgraduate students with an interest in parallel computing.

• Computer manufacturers
• Parallel computers
• Parallelverarbeitung
• Rechnerarchitektur
• Segment
• Transputer
• computer architecture
• operating system
• parallel computing
• parallel processing
• processor
• programming
• programming language
• supercomputer

• Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

  Arthur Trew, Greg Wilson

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