Parallel Machines and Languages

Abstract

From the point of view of computational or simulational science there simply cannot be too great a variety of computer architectures. The diversity of problems being investigated is enormous, including for example the inversion of large matrices, as in Monte Carlo simulations of lattice gauge theory; problems in molecular dynamics, where the interaction between particles can be short range or else one needs to calculate the interactions between all pairs of particles; and Ising-model types of Monte Carlo simulations for statistical mechanics systems. In principle each of the problems can be dealt with on any architecture. However, in practice not every architecture fits the needs of the prob..