Single processor supercomputers have achieved great speeds and have been pushing
hardware technology to the physical limit of chip manufacturing. But soon this trend
will come to an end, because there are physical and architectural bounds, which limit
the computational power that can be achieved with a single processor system. In this
book, we study advanced computer architectures that utilize parallelism via multiple
processing units. While parallel computing, in the form of internally linked
processors, was the main form of parallelism, advances in computer networks has
created a new type of parallelism in the form of networked autonomous computers.
Instead of putting everything in a single box and tightly couple processors to
memory, the Internet achieved a kind of parallelism by loosely connecting everything
outside of the box. To get the most out of a computer system with internal
or external parallelism, designers and software developers must understand the
interaction between hardware and software parts of the system. This is the reason
we wrote this book. We want the reader to understand the power and limitations
of multiprocessor systems. Our goal is to apprise the reader of both the beneficial
and challenging aspects of advanced architecture and parallelism. The material in
this book is organized in 10 chapters, as follows