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Special Issue: Parallel and Distributed Computing (EuroPar 2005)
Author(s) -
Cunha José C.,
Medeiros Pedro D.
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
concurrency and computation: practice and experience
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.309
H-Index - 67
eISSN - 1532-0634
pISSN - 1532-0626
DOI - 10.1002/cpe.1267
Subject(s) - computer science , distributed computing , debugging , correctness , concurrency , grid computing , distributed memory , concurrent computing , grid , partitioned global address space , parallel computing , programming paradigm , shared memory , programming language , geometry , mathematics
Parallel and distributed computing has been changing since the 1980s in many significant dimensions. Improvements in computation, storage, and communication infrastructures have enabled new classes of parallel and distributed applications. Evolutions at the computer system and architecture levels have led to the development of a diversity of platforms, ranging from supercomputers, sharedand distributed-memory multiprocessors, localand wide-area networks, to heterogeneous largescale distributed grid environments. Such changes have motivated important advances in systems software, tools, and environments, and in the programming models, languages, and methods for parallel and distributed computing. Such diversity of dimensions has also required a change in perspective of the software developer, in order to face the difficulties of meeting the correctness and performance specifications, as required by each specific application. For instance, the techniques and tools for parallel program debugging and performance tuning for a tightly coupled multiprocessor are quite distinct from the ones for debugging and performance evaluation of a large-scale distributed grid application. The changes in paradigms relate to multiple dimensions, such as