How We Got Here: A brief history of the evolution of parallel processing in high-performance computing

David Barkai
HPC Consultant

Stevenson Hall 1300
11:00 AM - 11:50 AM

HPC underwent several dramatic changes in system architecture over the last 50 years. From the pre-70’s mainframe, to vector processors and multiprocessors of the 80s, followed by the emergence of the “killer micros” and shift to commodity processors and clusters. From shared memory to distributed memory systems, and the addition of accelerators (GPUs). This journey is accompanied by tracking the transition from a single thread program execution to ever increasing levels of parallelism, and the implications to the software tools and the application end user. HPC today is much more than the domain of numerical simulations. It includes data analytics and AI.