David Padua – författare

Containing over 300 entries in an A-Z format, the Encyclopedia of Parallel Computing provides easy, intuitive access to relevant information for professionals and researchers seeking access to any aspect within the broad field of parallel computing. Topics for this comprehensive reference were selected, written, and peer-reviewed by an international pool of distinguished researchers in the field.  The Encyclopedia is broad in scope, covering machine organization, programming languages, algorithms, and applications.  Within each area, concepts, designs, and specific implementations are presented.  The highly-structured essays in this work comprise synonyms, a definition and discussion of the topic, bibliographies, and links to related literature. Extensive cross-references to other entries within the Encyclopedia support efficient, user-friendly searchers for immediate access to useful information.

 Key concepts presented in the Encyclopedia of Parallel Computing include; laws and metrics; specific numerical and non-numerical algorithms; asynchronous algorithms; libraries of subroutines; benchmark suites;  applications; sequential consistency and cache coherency; machine classes such as clusters, shared-memory multiprocessors, special-purpose machines and dataflow machines; specific machines such as Cray supercomputers, IBM’s cell processor and Intel’s multicore machines; race detection and auto parallelization; parallel programming languages, synchronization primitives, collective operations, message passing libraries, checkpointing, and operating systems. 

 Topics covered: Speedup, Efficiency, Isoefficiency, Redundancy, Amdahls law, Computer Architecture Concepts, Parallel Machine Designs, Benmarks, Parallel Programming concepts & design, Algorithms, Parallel applications.

 This authoritative reference will be published in two formats: print and online.  The online edition features hyperlinks to cross-references and to additional significant research.

 Related Subjects:  supercomputing, high-performance computing, distributed computing

This historical survey of parallel processing from 1980 to 2020 is a follow-up to the authors’ 1981 Tutorial on Parallel Processing, which covered the state of the art in hardware, programming languages, and applications. Here, we cover the evolution of the field since 1980 in: parallel computers, ranging from the Cyber 205 to clusters now approaching an exaflop, to multicore microprocessors, and Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) in commodity personal devices; parallel programming notations such as OpenMP, MPI message passing, and CUDA streaming notation; and seven parallel applications, such as finite element analysis and computer vision. Some things that looked like they would be major trends in 1981, such as big Single Instruction Multiple Data arrays disappeared for some time but have been revived recently in deep neural network processors. There are now major trends that did not exist in 1980, such as GPUs, distributed memory machines, and parallel processing in nearly every commodity device.

This book is intended for those that already have some knowledge of parallel processing today and want to learn about the history of the three areas. In parallel hardware, every major parallel architecture type from 1980 has scaled-up in performance and scaled-out into commodity microprocessors and GPUs, so that every personal and embedded device is a parallel processor. There has been a confluence of parallel architecture types into hybrid parallel systems. Much of the impetus for change has been Moore’s Law, but as clock speed increases have stopped and feature size decreases have slowed down, there has been increased demand on parallel processing to continue performance gains. In programming notations and compilers, we observe that the roots of today’s programming notations existed before 1980. And that, through a great deal of research, the most widely used programming notations today, although the result of much broadening of these roots, remain close to target system architectures allowing the programmer to almost explicitly use the target’s parallelism to the best of their ability. The parallel versions of applications directly or indirectly impact nearly everyone, computer expert or not, and parallelism has brought about major breakthroughs in numerous application areas. Seven parallel applications are studied in this book.