We
all know that the silicon based chips are reaching a physical limit in processing
speed, as they are constrained by the speed of electricity, light and certain
thermodynamic laws. A viable solution to overcome this limitation is to connect
multiple processors working in coordination with each other to solve grand challenge
problems. Hence, high performance computing requires the use of Massively Parallel
Processing (MPP) systems containing thousands of power full CPUs.Processing
of multiple tasks simultaneously on multiple processors is called Parallel Processing.
The parallel program consists of multiple active processes simultaneously solving
a given problem. A given task is divided into multiple sub tasks using divide-and-conquer
technique and each one of them are processed on different CPUs. Programming on
multiprocessor system using divide-and-conquer technique is called Parallel Processing.The
development of parallel processing is being influenced by many factors. The prominent
among them include the following:
1.Computational
requirements are ever increasing, both in the area of scientific and business
computing. The technical computing problems, which require high-speed computational
power, are related to life sciences, aerospace, geographical information systems,
mechanical design and analysis, etc.
2.Sequential architectures reaching physical
limitation, as they are constrained by the speed of light and thermodynamics laws.
Speed with which sequential CPUs can operate is reaching saturation point ( no
more vertical growth ), and hence an alternative way to get high computational
speed is to connect multiple CPUs ( opportunity for horizontal growth ).
