Parallel Computing In India

[VelMurugan]

Parallel Computing In India

We all know that the silicon based chips are reaching a physical limit in processing speed, as they are constrained by the speed of electricity, light and certain thermodynamic laws. A viable solution to overcome this limitation is to connect multiple processors working in coordination with each other to solve grand challenge problems. Hence, high performance computing requires the use of Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) systems containing thousands of power full CPUs.

Processing of multiple tasks simultaneously on multiple processors is called Parallel Processing. The parallel program consists of multiple active processes simultaneously solving a given problem. A given task is divided into multiple sub tasks using divide-and-conquer technique and each one of them are processed on different CPUs. Programming on multiprocessor system using divide-and-conquer technique is called Parallel Processing.The development of parallel processing is being influenced by many factors. The prominent among them include the following:

1.Computational requirements are ever increasing, both in the area of scientific and business computing. The technical computing problems, which require high-speed computational power, are related to life sciences, aerospace, geographical information systems, mechanical design and analysis, etc.

2.Sequential architectures reaching physical limitation, as they are constrained by the speed of light and thermodynamics laws. Speed with which sequential CPUs can operate is reaching saturation point ( no more vertical growth ), and hence an alternative way to get high computational speed is to connect multiple CPUs ( opportunity for horizontal growth ).

[Heshsham]

I would like to further clarify that the biggest problem is that of Power dissipation. Lets say your customer is asking a faster virus scanner (data portability is easier and now you have Terra bytes in a small pen drive, so scanning it takes a lot of time). One option is to increase the clock speed. But when we increase the clock speed, power dissipation will increase (Power dissipation in transistors is directly proportional to square of the operating frequency), Just like when you start walking at very high speed, you would start sweating  and heating.  So this option is not a good one as I want better power backup on my devices. Further I will have to employ costly cooling machanism.

The other option left is to have multiple Processors work simultaneously by doing parallel programming.  And that is what the current and future trend!!

Heshsham@ HbeonGpgpu www.hbeongpgpu.com