Past, Present, Parallel: A Survey of Available Parallel Computer Systems

Product Description

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 concentrat…