Combinations of parallel/vector architectures are well established, and one
corporation (Fujitsu) has announced plans to build a system with over 200 of its high
end vector processors. Manufacturers have set themselves the goal
of achieving teraflops ( 10
arithmetic operations per second)
performance by the middle of the decade, and it
is clear this will be obtained only by a system with a thousand processors or more.
Workstation technology has continued to improve, with
processor designs now using a combination of RISC, pipelining, and
parallel processing. As a result it is now possible to purchase
a desktop workstation for about $30,000 that has the same
overall computing power (100 megaflops) as fourth generation
supercomputers. This development has sparked an interest in
heterogeneous computing: a program started on one
workstation can find idle workstations elsewhere in the local
network to run parallel subtasks.
