Partitioning computations and parallel processing

Local Area Networks (lans) provide for file transfers, electronic mail and for access to shared devices such as printers, tape drives and large disks. Butlan do not usually provide for pooling the power of their computer workstations to work concurrently on programs demanding large amounts of computing power. This paper discusses the issues involved in partitioning a few selected classes of problems of general interest for concurrent execution over alan of workstations. It also presents the conceptual framework for supervisory software, a Distributed Computing Executive, which can accomplish this, to implement a ‘Computing Network’ namedcone. The classes of problems discussed include the following: problems dealing with the physics of continua, optimization as well as artificial intelligence problems involving tree and graph searches and transaction processing problems.