ian@utcs.UUCP (Ian F. Darwin) (12/07/84)
Special Seminar: Supercomputers: Past, Present and Future
Speaker: Jack Worlton, Laboratory Fellow,
Los Alamos National Laboratory
When: Thursday, December 13, 1984, 1100 am
Where: McLennan Labs room 102
60 St. George Street,
Toronto
Abstract:
There are two major changes occurring in the field of supercomputing
at the present time: one is a technical change and the other is a
marketing change.
The technical change is being driven by the shift from single-instruction-
stream architectures to multiple-instruction-stream architectures. This
change is perhaps the most profound change that has occurred in the past 30
years and will significantly affect large-scale scientific computing,
including changes to mathematical models, algorithms, application codes,
languages, compilers, operating systems and libraries.
The marketing change is being caused by the entry of Japan into supercomputing
marketing - a field that has been exclusively American for more than twenty
years. There is now the possibility that this increased level of competition
will create a more rapid rate of development of supercomputer technology
than has been experienced in the past several decades, and this will clearly
benefit supercomputer users.
These major trends and their implications will be analyzed in this lecture.
--
Ian Darwin, Toronto
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