High Performance Computing: Grid Computing & Parallel Programming

Science is constantly pushing the limits of computational and storage power and even the fastest supercomputers are not capable of satisfying the computational demand. Recent advances in hardware technologies have provided more computing power than ever before and with the advent of multiple core processors we can expect this trend to continue. It is expected that processors with hundreds of cores will appear a few years from now. Yet having unlimited computing power is fruitless without an efficient means of writing applications on those platforms. It would be naive to expect that current programming models that have not been able to keep up with current hardware technologies will be able to exploit the possibilities offered by the new machines. The central issues that we face now are making the computing power currently available more accessible to scientific researchers and individuals, and also keeping software development on track with the advancements in hardware.