PARALLEL COMPUTING

From Multicores and GPUs to Petascale. Parallel computing technologies have brought dramatic changes to mainstream computing the majority of todays PCs, laptops and even notebooks incorporate multiprocessor chips with up to four processors.

Standard components are increasingly combined with GPUs Graphics Processing Unit, originally designed for high-speed graphics processing, and FPGAs Free Programmable Gate Array to build parallel computers with a wide spectrum of high-speed processing functions.

The scale of this powerful hardware is limited only by factors such as energy consumption and thermal control.

However, in addition to