Parallelism: Past and Future, Professor Arthur Trew, EPCC, University of Edinburgh.
Ten to fifteen years ago over 50 companies produced HPC computers based on proprietary microprocessors, interconnects and software. Today, if we ignore the cluster resellers, there are only a handful - despite a growing marketplace. The rationale for this change has been the emergence of de facto standards in hardware and software driven by economic pressures. At the same time, the ever-increasing cost of ownership and concerns about the end of Moore’s Law are driving some manufacturers to seek more innovative solutions than relying on standard microprocessors. This talk will look at the current computer architectures available today, their application to different problems in computational science, and then look forward to the hardware developments which might be expected in the coming years.