Massively Parallel Processing: Architecture

INTRODUCTION Organizations today require a great deal more processing power to accommodate new kinds of applications, such as an information delivery facility, data mining, and electronic commerce. This need for large computing cycles may be met relatively inexpensively through massively parallel processing. Although massively parallel processors have been around for some time, their use has been limited primarily to scientific and technical applications, and to applications in the defense industry. Today, parallel processing is moving out to organizations in other industries, which find their own data volumes growing exponentially. The growth is not only from traditional transaction systems but also from new data types, such as text, images, audio, and video. Massively parallel processing is enabling companies to exploit vast amounts of data for both strategic and operational purposes. Parallel processing technology is potentially very powerful, capable of providing a performance boost two to three orders of magnitude greater than sequential uniprocessing and of scaling up gracefully with data base sizes. However, parallel processing is also easy to misuse. Data base management system (DBMS) and hardware vendors offer a wide variety of products, and the technical features P A Y O F F I D E A